Hales guides Nottinghamshire to narrow win

Nottinghamshire 382 and 266 for 7 beat Worcestershire 315 and 328 by three wickets
Scorecard

Football managers like to believe that the mark of champions is the ability to play badly and yet still win. Over the course of a 90-minute football match that might be possible but a four-day cricket match, with so many more opportunities for one side to gain a clear upper hand, is another matter. Yet Nottinghamshire appear to have the knack.

They won their opening two matches without being particularly impressive and pulled it off again here in an engaging contest that could easily have gone the way of Worcestershire, long odds-on to be relegated before the season began and, by contrast to the champions, stuck the worrying habit of losing matches they might have won.

In the opinion of their coach, Nottinghamshire dropped too many catches and made too many errors at the crease to feel comfortable with themselves, even though they lead the Division One table with an ostensibly unblemished record. But their failings are at least familiar ones, the consequence of which is that there seems always to be one or two among the senior players who can draw upon their experience and deliver at the critical moment.

More often that not, it is Chris Read or Paul Franks who comes up with the answer and this time they both played crucial roles, Franks in particular in the first innings, when his 82 enabled Notts to grab a 67-run lead that was always going to be valuable on an uncertain surface.

And when the match threatened to slip away from them in the final innings, with a 262-run winning target still 54 runs away from them with only four wickets in hand, the two delivered in tandem, gambling that an attacking approach would deflate a Worcestershire side of brittle self-belief. Franks hit 26 off 36 balls, Read 35 off 44, finishing the job with a towering six over the head of the inexperienced off-spinner, Moeen Ali.

Worcestershire deserved some consolation, yet it was a fittingly emphatic way in which to end a contest that had kept the crowd here fully engaged when some might have been tempted, for obvious reasons of national interest, to stay away. It had unfolded with ebb and flow from the start and did so again on the last day as Notts appeared to have the initiative but then found themselves facing a more testing last-innings run chase than they would have liked.

Their openers went cheaply, which was really no surprise, but Alex Hales, one of a rich crop of young players making their mark around the circuit, then looked to be making the task relatively simple, threatening to compile an innings to match the quality that Alexei Kervezee had revealed in Worcestershire's cause.

Yet there was another twist. Hales, a 22-year-old right-hander with a good eye and an assertive style, looked as sure, despite the vagaries of the surface, to complete a century as he can have felt in any innings in his career so far. But his attempt to hit medium-pacer Gareth Andrew over the on-side field for his 14th boundary instead flew off a leading edge to cover. Twice out in the 80s in Nottinghamshire's unlikely win over Yorkshire at Headingley last week, he had suffered the same fate this time.

Cursing his error as much as his luck, Hales threw his head back in frustration, not least because he had left his side with yet another sticky spot to overcome. Samit Patel, caught behind after an inside edge had looped to the wicketkeeper via pad or body, and Adam Voges, leg before to Wright, had gone too in the moments before as Worcestershire, willing battlers, had worked their way back into contention. When Steven Mullaney, having begun with a couple of classy cover drives, lost his off stump, Notts suddenly found themselves six down and some way short of their target.

But Worcestershire, for whom Alan Richardson and Damien Wright bowled well but their supporting cast less so, could not push their advantage. The pitch by now was as likely to send the ball shooting through at ankle height as to threaten a batsman's fingers but Read and Franks know such conditions well and had their measure again. Moeen Ali, at mid-wicket, held a fine catch to give Richardson his ninth wicket in the match as Franks fell, but by then the job was as good as done.

It was tough on Worcestershire, for whom the impressive Alexei Kervezee might have stretched the home side more had he not been caught at gully from a ball that struck him painfully on the top hand. He had added only five to his overnight score and Gareth Andrew, his partners in a 135-run stand for the sixth wicket, went shortly afterwards, caught behind off Franks. Yet a breezy 33 from Wright gave the home side more to think about.

Kervezee was their big consolation. "I thought he was superb," the Worcestershire director of cricket, Steve Rhodes, said. "What impressed me most was the way the penny seems to be dropping about playing the ball on its merits. Sometimes he is a runaway train in the way he plays and gets out but in this innings he blocked the good balls and put the bad ball away for four and he did it in a way that was quite unfazed by some difficult conditions and some good bowling."