(writes Andrew Hignell)
Glamorgan head to Swansea for their next match in the Specsavers County Championship with Derbyshire being the visitors, as in 2018, for the annual Festival of County Cricket in West Wales with the four-day game scheduled to get underway at 11am on Tuesday, 11th June.
Glamorgan’s spectacular innings victory at Northampton has seen them surge up to second place in the Division Two table, eleven points behind Lancashire who drew with Leicestershire last week at Liverpool. Derbyshire are currently in fourth place having lost to Durham at Chester-le-Street after a dramatic collapse in the final hour.
Derbyshire were the visitors to St. Helen’s last summer with the game seeing Usman Khawaja and Kiran Carlson share a double-century stand before the Peakites’ tail-enders clung on for a draw. This was Derbyshire’s first visit to Swansea since 2003 and a game that , Glamorgan won by an innings and 70 runs as captain Robert Croft produced a return of 6/71 in the visitors first innings which not only saw Derbyshire follow-on but put Glamorgan in the driving seat. After Alex Wharf and Mike Kasprowicz had made early inroads, the spin-twins of Croft and Dean Cosker filleted the lower order as Glamorgan completed a resounding victory.
This will be Derbyshire’s twenty-first visit to the picturesque ground overlooking Swansea Bay, with their last Championship victory on the St. Helen’s ground – laid out on reclaimed sand-dunes during the 1870s – coming in August 1983. As far as that contest was concerned, the seam bowlers were on top for much of the game, rather than the slow bowlers as so often has been the case on the sand-based surface which over the years has seen a plethora of outstanding performances by spinners from both Glamorgan and the visiting teams.
In that particular match during August 1983, batsmen Rodney Ontong and Alan Lewis Jones each posted half-centuries in Glamorgan’s first innings, but when the Welsh county batted for a second time, Ole Mortensen – the Danish fast bowler - and Colin Tunnicliffe made inroads for the Peakites and it was only John Hopkins who offered an lengthy resistance as the opening batsman scored a fine hundred. Despite the best efforts of the home attack, they did not quite have enough runs to play with as Derbyshire won a closely-fought contest by two wickets.