Glamorgan take a break from white-ball cricket as they return to Championship action as they meet Sussex in the four-day competition at Sophia Gardens with the match scheduled to start at 1100 on Sunday 25 June. (writes Andrew Hignell)
The two teams met earlier in the season at Hove in a remarkable and high-scoring draw. Having made just 123 in their first innings, they amassed a record 737 in their second, with hundreds from Marnus Labuschagne, Kiran Carlson and Michael Neser. The two Australians are now in their country’s Ashes squad, but Glamorgan have recruited another man who has proudly worn the baggy green as leg-spinner Mitchell Swepson is poised to make his debut in county cricket.
Last summer at Cardiff, Glamorgan beat Sussex by five wickets after Eddie Byrom and Colin Ingram shared a second wicket stand of 328 runs in 90 overs. This was Glamorgan’s first victory at Sophia Gardens 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 (now at Hampshire) 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.