Essex v Derbyshire day 3

Alastair Cook

So, 199 to win with five wickets left.

Logic and forty-odd years of cricket watching suggests that it isn’t going to happen, especially on a last day pitch where the occasional ball is now keeping low. It shouldn’t stop us trying and it won’t, of course, but for me there’s not enough runs in our lower order for us to win this one.

It is right that you pick your seam bowlers to take wickets, of course, and Derbyshire’s have done well in this game, especially Tim Groenewald and Mark Footitt, but you wouldn’t put your beer money on Footitt or Mark Turner playing the sort of lower order cameo to which we have become accustomed from Tony Palladino or Jonathan Clare. Their absence has left our tail looking longer than of late, not a criticism but a statement of fact.

Of course, while there’s Shiv, there’s hope, but Richard Johnson, David Wainwright and Tim Groenewald must dig in tomorrow and help the little master eke out those runs and get us at least to respectability.

The difference so far has been Alastair Cook’s monumental seven hour-plus innings, without which we’d be sitting pretty tonight. He showed his class when it was needed, as has Chanderpaul, of course, yet to be dismissed in the game.

Sometimes you don’t get the breaks in the game of cricket. Both Wayne Madsen and Wes Durston were caught down the leg side, always a cruel way to go, while Chesney was out to one that kept horribly low. Such misfortune tends to even out over the season, but in one that might otherwise have been close, you can live without them.

I don’t expect to be reporting on a win tomorrow, but I hope that we take it closer to the wire and show more than we did at the start of day two, when we were in a similar position. Nor do I think this is setting the standard for the season. Were it not for one world-class batsman at his best, we’d be in a winning position tonight.

Whether we get there tomorrow is down to another world-class batsman and whether he gets the support that he needs to pull off something extraordinary.

Postscript – nice to see a mid-afternoon score update from the second team game. I do hope we see these as the season goes on, as we will all be watching them with great interest.