Newly promoted Glamorgan will welcome Lancashire to Sophia Gardens, Cardiff for their final contest in the Rothesay County Championship Division Two, with the game scheduled to get underway at 1030 on Wednesday, 24 September. (writes Andrew Hignell)
The rain-affected draws last week at Derby and Old Trafford, plus Gloucestershire’s frenetic final hour defeat of Northamptonshire at Bristol, all mean that Glamorgan go into this final round of four-day matches with promotion safely in their grasp, with the Welsh county in second place in the table, 25 points ahead of third-placed Derbyshire and 26 points above Gloucestershire in fourth spot. With a maximum of only 24 points available to each team in their closing games of the summer, Glamorgan know that they will return to Division One for the first time since 2005.
Glamorgan were victorious by 154 runs when the two teams met at Old Trafford at the end of July, with captain Sam Northeast and his deputy Kiran Carlson each scoring centuries in the second innings and sharing a third-wicket stand of 215 which further built on Glamorgan’s already dominant position at the halfway stage of the contest with Mason Crane having claimed 6/19 to humble the Red Roses for a paltry 137. Chasing a target of 473 from the remaining 147 overs, Lancashire’s batters fared better in their second innings than in their first, but with Ben Kellaway and Crane each claiming three wickets and with Asitha Fernando and James Harris each delivering probing spells, it was only a matter of time before Glamorgan registered their first victory on Lancashire soil since 1997.
This will be Lancashire’s eighth visit to Sophia Gardens for a Championship match with their most recent being in June 2021 when Glamorgan completed an emphatic six-wicket victory in a match dominated by the bowlers, with Michael Neser bagging seven wickets. Lancashire suffered a second innings collapse, losing six wickets for 36 runs in 39 balls leaving Glamorgan a target of 188 to win. Joe Cooke and David Lloyd laid the foundation by adding 72 for the first wicket, with the Welsh county needing only a further 51 runs on the third morning.
It took them 19.1 overs to reach their target with Marnus Labuschagne hitting the winning runs after completing a 52-ball fifty – the only one in the match – as he saw his adopted county to their first Championship victory over Lancashire at Cardiff since 1996 – a year when the batter was a toddler in his native South Africa – and a game which had seen an imperious 214 from Matthew Maynard see Glamorgan to a mammoth total of 505 besides underpinning a 48-run victory for the Welsh county with spin-twins Robert Croft claiming 5/47 and Dean Cosker 4/60 on the final day.
Glamorgan also beat Lancashire by four wickets in a rain-affected game at Sophia Gardens during August 1968 with an unbeaten 95 by Alan Jones seeing the Welsh county to their target of 178 inside 39 overs. Lancashire’s sole victory in Championship cricket at the Cardiff ground came in August 1981 when the Red Roses won by 66 runs after half-centuries by Clive Lloyd and Bernard Reidy, plus a return of 6/44 by Peter Lee trumped career-best figures of 8/70 by Glamorgan’s off-spinner Barry Lloyd.
The contests between the two teams in 1967, 1970 and 1984 at Sophia Gardens all ended in draws. In contrast, Lancashire have been victorious on in North Wales during their visits to Colwyn Bay – winning by 14 runs in 2013, by an innings and 157 runs in 2015 and by an innings and 150 runs in 2019.
There are several milestones for a couple of Glamorgan players, with Timm van der Gugten set to make his 100th first-class appearance for the Welsh county, whilst on the batting front, Kiran Carlson also needs a further 22 runs to reach the coveted 1,000-run landmark in first-class cricket this summer.