Sussex are Glamorgan’s next opponents in the Vitality County Championship with the match at Sophia Gardens scheduled to start at 1100 on Friday 10 May. (writes Andrew Hignell)
Sussex are currently the leaders of Division Two having beaten Gloucestershire at Hove by four wickets, and then Derbyshire at Derby last weekend by an innings and 124 runs. The South coast team have 74 points with Glamorgan in sixth place on 44 points having drawn all four of their Championship matches so far this summer.
Last year’s match at Cardiff between the two teams saw Sam Northeast score a century before Sussex were left with the task of scoring 359 in the remaining 113 overs. After the early loss of Tom Haines and Ari Karvelas, the nightwatchman, Sussex mounted a rally until Mitchell Swepson, the Australian leg-spinner found plenty of assistance from the surface. Oli Carter, who the previous year had posted a career-best at the ground, then led a rearguard action and survived the final 21.2 overs with last man Henry Shipley to deprive Glamorgan of their second win of the season and prevented Glamorgan from completing back-to-back victories over the South Coast club at Sophia Gardens.
In 2022 Glamorgan had beaten Sussex by five wickets after Eddie Byrom and Colin Ingram shared a second wicket stand of 328 runs in 90 overs. It had been Glamorgan’s first victory over Sussex at Cardiff since April 1999 when both Simon Jones and Robert Croft each took five-wicket hauls, before a superb 153 from Steve James helped the Welsh county successfully chase a target of 336 on the final day to record a comprehensive victory by six wickets.
However, Sussex were the victors by eight wickets when the two teams met at Cardiff in the opening match of the 2021 Championship season. The contest, staged behind closed doors, was something of a personal triumph for Ollie Robinson, the Sussex seamer, who gave an object lesson in the virtues of line and length, harnessed to an ability to extract late movement. In the process of claiming thirteen wickets, his second innings haul of 9/78 was both a career-best return, and Sussex’s best-ever in Championship cricket against Glamorgan, with Robinson, on the back of this performance and a series of other decent spells, subsequently winning a place in the England Test squad.
Their previous visit to Cardiff in 2016 had been a much closer affair with the visitors recording a narrow victory by two wickets as the South Coast club successfully chased a target of 233 on the final day. Timm van der Gugten had given Glamorgan the perfect start as he removed Ed Joyce with the first delivery of the innings, before returning after the tea interval with a superb spell of hostile fast bowling, claimed 3/22 in the space of seven overs to put Glamorgan into the ascendancy. But the pendulum swung decisively in Sussex’s favour as the eighth wicket pairing of Ben Brown and Danny Briggs (now with Warwickshire) added 55 in the space of nine overs with the latter using the long handle with plenty of luck as he hit the ball just over the head of the Glamorgan fielders. After Brown was dismissed, Briggs scampered a series of singles with George Garton as Sussex reached their target with 20 balls remaining.