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Days Two, Three & Four

Day Two: Another cloudy, humid start to Monday, and Sussex accrued only 10 more runs before Ben Gibbon had Jack Carson caught for 64 to wrap up the innings on 348. Worcestershire's reply was brighter than the morning, reaching lunch on 94-1 with Gareth Roderick the sole casualty, and as the sun graced the south coast through the course of the afternoon, so Jake Libby graced the quaint old County Ground with some marvellous and brisk batting, bringing up his fourteenth first-class century with a square drive for four as Worcs made it to tea 205-3, trailing by 143. The fun continued well beyond five o'clock with 150 for Libby and a half-century for the very fluent Adam Hose, and as the sun declined, the Pears found themselves on a comfortable 366-3, 18 runs in the lead with seven wickets in hand. From there it should have been an attritional grind to kill the game off, but instead it was a classic collapse; six wickets fell for 29 runs as the old ball bamboozled a couple of batsmen with some sharp turn, before the new ball skittled the entire middle order and left the Pears teetering on 410-9 overnight, the lead just 62.

Day Three: The sun was out to bake the pitch hard and flat on Tuesday, but Worcestershire gained no benefit from it; with Libby caught behind for 198 off Ari Karvelas, the overnight score of 410 was all she wrote, and 62 the somewhat limp first-innings lead. The steady reversal of fortune over the last couple of hours of cricket became all the more galling as Sussex wiped out that lead and cruised to 111-0 in time for lunch, which progressed to 143 before Joe Leach was finally able to have Tom Haines caught at first slip for 91. Yet incredibly, it became two in two balls as the other well-set opener, Tom Clark, feathered Matthew Waite behind for 50 with the first of the next over. It began to resemble a collapse of truly Worcestrian proportions for the hosts when Adam Finch first had James Coles caught for 2 top-edging a pull to midwicket, then sent a drifting yorker onto Oli Carter's toe to dismiss him LBW and make it 147-4. Sussex battled back during the remainder of the afternoon, taking tea on 238-5 after losing Dan Ibrahim LBW for 28 to Waite, but though the match looked on a knife-edge at 260-6 when Usama Mir had Fynn Hudson-Prentice caught behind for 54, the tail end once again proved too much for the Pears bowlers, and Sussex closed on 359-6 with a lead of 297.

Day Four: The wise money on a scorching mid-June Wednesday was all on a draw, but what a draw it was. Jack Carson's run-out for 75 was the last Sussex wicket to fall before their declaration came on 447-7, with the target 386 to win from seventy-nine overs. From the very beginning it was clear that Worcestershire were taking the chase seriously, and reached lunch 55-0. The loss of Roderick LBW for 33 didn't slow down Libby, who motored to his fifty courtesy of a generous four overthrows from Sussex, then began targeting Carson's off-spin for some big sixes. Alas, Carson had the last laugh, and for the second time in the match the opener fell short of a milestone when he edged to first slip for 97, but the Pears took tea on 195-2, needing 191 more with eight wickets in hand. In the all-out post-prandial assault, Jack Haynes went LBW for 44 and Adam Hose for a quickfire 47, both men playing a huge role in lifting Worcs up to 317-4, needing 69 off 73 balls. But with a defensive field and tight bowling, Sussex put the pressure on, and Brett D'Oliveira capped an uncharacteristically subdued showing by departing for a lacklustre 3. With Azhar Ali anchoring, it looked for a while like Waite would be the man to see it home, but after a few useful boundaries he too holed out for 18. With four overs left, the asking rate was a run a ball; off the last two, just 16 needed, but the boundaries had dried up completely. Perhaps worried about sparking a total collapse, Joe Leach seemed reluctant to go big, and so it fell to Azhar Ali - minutes after completing his century - to try an unorthodox approach; sadly, for such an orthodox batsman it was anathema, and his big step to leg to open up the off-side simply resulted in him outside-edging onto the stumps for 101. With 8 required from the last over, Usama Mir fell for 1 trying desperately to go over the top, leaving only five more balls and two wickets to get the job done. There are few things in cricket more special than a match where all four results are still possible on the penultimate ball, and that was the case in Hove this superlative June day; a plundered single from Finch ruled out a tie or a Worcestershire defeat (to the relief of more than a few of us who've read the script on occasions like this), but one last agricultural swing from Leach to Nathan McAndrew's final ball was more in hope than expectation, and the curtain fell on Worcestershire's innings of 381-8 just five runs short of what would have been a spectacular victory.

Match DRAWN

The Verdict: The merry-go-round of might-have-beens is always quick to start spinning after such a close (and to a certain extent, disappointing) result, so it has to be said first and foremost that this was a fantastic game of cricket which swung one way and the other for four full days before accelerating to an edge-of-the-seat conclusion, and on those grounds alone, it was a credit to the County Championship. More than a few pundits and journos, most of them neutral, suggested at the close that Worcestershire had bottled the chase from the point of needing 36 from 35 with five wickets in hand, and it's impossible to look at the scorecard without wondering whether Dolly needed to play that shot, whether Waitey could have settled for staying in till the end, whether Azhar might have pushed harder for the ones and twos, whether Leachy might have taken the risk of a big hit when the chips were down. There are undoubtedly parallel universes where they did those things and won a famous victory; there are others where they tried it and lost ignominiously. But while Schrödinger's cricketer can play out the possibilities in his box for all eternity, for the Pears to have taken this challenge on and come so close, having shot themselves in the foot by doing similar against Durham in April (chasing a smaller target), is an admirable effort in itself. And it would be disrespectful not to pay credit to the Sussex bowlers and fielders who never gave up the fight, and managed to do enough at the death to secure a draw which, over the four days, was absolutely a fair result.