Downcast Kent offer easy pickings

Glamorgan won by 5 wickets

ReportA failed promotion challenge left Kent demoralised at the end of the season and Glamorgan took full advantage

ECB Reporters Network

27-Sep-2017

Sam Northeast: Still no Kent promotion and no England interest • Getty Images

Glamorgan 229 and 192 for 5 (Selman 70) beat Kent 302 (Denly 152, Hogan 4-44) and 115 (Rouse 44, Hogan 6-43) by five wickets

Glamorgan chalked up their third win of the Specsavers County Championship campaign with more than a day to spare after reaching 192 for five in Canterbury to inflict a first home defeat of the season by five wickets upon a weary and downcast Kent side.

Having dismissed the hosts for a meagre 115 in their second innings, Glamorgan made the best of starts to their pursuit of a 189-run victory target when openers Nick Selman and Connor Brown posted 96 – the best partnership for any wicket in the match.

Brown ought to have departed with 15 to his name when Darren Stevens downed a regulation slip catch off the bowling of Calum Haggett, then Haggett was again the luckless bowler when Selman, on 64, was dropped by Zak Crawley at third slip.

Brown finally went for 33 to Haggett, caught at point at the second attempt by substitute fielder Oli Robinson, then, with his score on 70, Selman flayed at a wide one from Stevens to be caught behind for his 62nd first-class wicket and a career-best season’s haul.

With is next ball 41-year-old Stevens pegged back Kiran Carlson’s off stump via an inside edge then, just before tea, Jack Murphy flayed a wide one to Zak Crawley in the gully to give the Kent veteran five wickets in the match.

Only 10 balls after tea Chris Cooke drove a return catch to left-arm spinner Imran Qayyum, so it was left to David Lloyd, who scored a pugnacious inbeaten 35, to see his side over the win line with a slog-swept six off Qayyum.

Admittedly, conditions on day three fell with outrageous good fortune in Glamorgan’s favour – they bowled on a steamy overcast morning and batted under blue skies all afternoon – but for Kent it was pretty much all gloom and doom as their last day’s action of the season ended with a second championship defeat of the summer and their first red-ball defeat to Glamorgan on home soil since 1992 [Glamorgan secured an eight-wicket victory in an experimental pink-ball, four-day game here in 2011] .

At the start of the day, one-time promotion-chasers Kent resumed on their overnight score of 98 for six – a lead of 171 – and with top-scorer Adam Rouse, the county’s understudy wicketkeeper and substitute for Sam Billings, at the crease. But home hopes of setting a testing 200-plus target were soon quashed as Kent lost their last four wickets for nine runs in the space of 26 balls.

Haggett started the collapse, aiming an ambitious push drive at the ever-consistent Michael Hogan, Haggett played outside an off-cutter that darted down the Canterbury slope to pluck out middle stump and give Hogan five-wickets.

Rouse’s resistance ended for 44 when he toe-ended an attempted pull against Lucas Carey to mid-on, then, five balls later, Carey struck again by having Kent debutant Grant Stewart caught in the cordon by former Kent 2nd XI batsman Nick Selman.

Hogan polished it off by having last man Imran Qayyum caught behind for a first-ball duck to finish with six for 43 and career-best match figures of 10 for 87.

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