Wallace and from it Glam become animated

Dingy Bags as last minute locum reporter tells story of Day 1. He tells of frustrating day for Middlesex, a return appearance of current player but not on pitch, a disappearance and an innings that took days progress away from us. Thanks Dingy for stepping in.

It was an extraordinary day atLords on Thursday. The bat was beaten frequently; batsmen looked in trouble allthe time, certainly up until tea; rarely did you hear that unmistakeable soundof a ball being middled. And yet, and yet and yet...Glamorgan were stillbatting at the close, with 300 on the board.

It was similar to the first dayat Worcester: for the first three hours you fully expected a sudden clatter ofwickets. We even got off to a great start, Cosgrove walking across his stumpsonly to be beaten by Finn’s pace and the leg stump cartwheeling backwards.Powell looked positively frightened of Finn’s pace and Rees was strokeless,over an hour on seven. At one point Finn deflected a drive onto the stumps atthe non-striker’s end. It looked out but our luck really wasn’t in and RobBailey was unmoved

Murtagh and O’Brien wereprobing, looking likely to do some damage, only Bergie was a little expensive(but he still looked lovely Kimmy). So it went on. Simpson did drop a very hardchance off an inside edge from Finn but nothing else was missed – the batsmeneither failed to get a touch altogether, or edged it into the gaps.

In the afternoon, a steady fallof wickets to 147-5 and Murtagh, happy to report, finally in the action. Andthe innings was at the crossroads – I said so. I should explain that the windwas bitter and having started the day on the North Tower of the Pavilion, rightbehind the line of the wicket (yes that far over towards the Grandstand) I hadsought the sanctuary of The Middlesex Room. Actually, I had noticed somethingodd. Ben Scott, large as life, if that is the right term for that particularcricketer, was coming up from the Nursery End, having been practising. In facthe came up again later. Does he only go to Worcester for the matches? He waschatting to Auntie Janet and Ian I Love It, so I thought I’d go down to wishJanet a Happy New Season. Only, when I got there she’d gone. Two questions: whywas Scott there? Why WASN’T Janet there?

Anyway, I was in The MiddlesexRoom and it was 147-5 and we could have had them out for 200. But it didn’thappen. Allenby and Wallace batted pretty well, to be fair and our bowling lostits intensity. Shaggy bowled too many short balls and Malan, though he got awicket, also helped the scoring along.

So, Glamorgan got a decenttotal but, I repeat, the three main seamers, in particular, bowled with no luckat all. We deserved to have them out for 200 or less. I left the ground withthe uneasy feeling that we had a repeat of the Worcester game on our hands: ourbatters would not have the good fortune to miss it as often as theirs did.