Day 3, Middlesex v Kent, in Pictures

Day 3, Middlesex v Kent, in Pictures

Felix The Red Snapper (new to me, new to you) has kindly sent in some photos from the day, including the “ball of the century” itself.  While he admits in his e-mail to an amateur approach to photography, his pictures, together with some submitted earlier in the week by Janet, tell the story in pictures.

Apologies if this page takes some time to load on your machines, but I thought you would want to see the pictures at the highest resolution possible.

Many thanks to Felix and to Janet. 

Also many, many congratulations to Nick Compton.  It is always a special moment to witness a maiden CC hundred or fivefer and I was delighted to be there to witness it myself.

Little did he know when Janet took this shot on Wednesday that his big day was so near.

Compo looks solid in defence during the nervous nineties.  When he came to the crease at 45/4, Ged was convinced that Middlesex were done for – it seemed too much to ask of the youngsters to put together a competitive score.  Make no mistake, this was a hundred when it really mattered,

Cook cannot get through Wright’s defence either – Compo needed solid support from the lower order and Wright provided the best of that; a superb and possibly match-winning partnership of 88.

The ball of the century – Felix writes that he was so excited by this stage that he lost the best of his camera settings.  The thing that Ged finds remarkable about this picture is that you can (just) see the ball in flight still, yet Felix seems to have anticipated exactly where that ball is going to go.  Perhaps that’s just coincidence.

The shadows lengthen, Ali lets fly as a beautiful spring day at Lord’s draws to a close.  As always, the place looks a picture.

As for a match report, the official report will say it all in words and here we’ll say it mostly in pictures.  The game is, yet again, wonderfully poised at stumps.  This is what County Championship cricket is all about.  Wonderful stuff.