Glamorgan travel to Northampton for their next contest in the Bob Willis Trophy which is scheduled to start at the Wantage Road ground at 11am on Saturday, August 22nd (writes Andrew Hignell).
The East Midlands side were Glamorgan’s opponents in the opening Championship match at Cardiff last summer. It proved to be a high-scoring draw as three Glamorgan players – Marnus Labuschagne, Billy Root and Kiran Carlson – each scored vibrant hundreds before Northamptonshire replied with 750 with centuries from Ricardo Vasconcelas and the now out-of-contract Rob Newton who added 303 for the first wicket before Rob Keogh became the third Northamptonshire batsman to reach three figures as the game meandered to a tame conclusion, but not before Nick Selman had claimed his maiden first-class wicket!
Two months later, it was a very different story at Wantage Road as Glamorgan trounced Northamptonshire with an innings victory after a career-best 229 by Billy Root and some outstanding seam bowling by the triumvirate of Michael Hogan, Marchant de Lange and Timm van der Gugten as Northamptonshire were dismissed for 209 and 195 following Glamorgan’s first innings total of 547. Besides Root’s double-century, the Welsh county’s mammoth total also included half-centuries from Tom Cullen and Michael Hogan.
Their handsome victory in 2019 was their first in Championship cricket at Wantage Road since 2012. In that game eight years ago Glamorgan won by three wickets, thanks to a composed innings by Jim Allenby, plus a breezy knock by John Glover, which saw the Welsh county successfully chase a target of 351 on the final day.
2016 and 2017 had each seen Northamptonshire record sizeable victories at their headquarters. The game in 2017 saw Glamorgan lose by an innings and 22 runs in a contest dominated by seam bowlers, whilst their visit to Northampton in 2016 saw Glamorgan lose a match where the spinners were dominant. Rob Keogh and Graeme White shared all twenty wickets between them, whilst Kiran Carlson, the Welsh county’s teenage debutant, claimed a ‘five-for’ with his occasional spin bowling.
Once again, there are some personal milestones looming for Glamorgan players in this match with bowlers Michael Hogan needing one further wicket to reach the career milestone of 600 wickets in all first-class cricket, whilst Graham Wagg’s tally for Glamorgan is also one short of the 250 landmark in first-class games. On the batting front, Billy Root’s efforts this summer have taken him to 979 first-class runs for his adopted county so the Yorkshireman only needs a further 21 runs to reach the threshold of a thousand.