Glamorgan return to red-ball action as they meet Sussex in the LV=Insurance County Championship with the four-day contest scheduled to get underway at Sophia Gardens, Cardiff starting at 1100 on Sunday 12 June at 1100. (writes Andrew Hignell)
Sussex were the victors last summer 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.
In fifteen encounters against Sussex at Sophia Gardens, Glamorgan have been victorious on four occasions with their latest success taking place in 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.