Toby Roland-Jones five-for sees Middlesex to innings win over Glamorgan

Middlesex wrapped up victory against Glamorgan by an innings and 82 runs inside the first hour of the third day of their LV= Insurance County Championship match in Cardiff.

Glamorgan started the day still needing 111 runs to make Middlesex bat again but, having seen the Middlesex tail put on 226 runs in their innings, there would have been a glimmer of hope.

Those hopes faded very fast as two wickets fell within the first three overs of the day with Toby Roland-Jones claiming his first five wicket haul of the season.

Middlesex finish this match with 22 points to Glamorgan's three after the visitors put in a near perfect performance on the second and third days of this match.

The two Glamorgan not-out batsmen at the start of the day were Sam Northeast and Michael Neser and it needed to be those two who put a real dent in the deficit. That is not what Glamorgan got. Both were dismissed by Roland-Jones within the space of eight balls, Northeast edging to second slip and Neser caught at mid-on.

With just nine runs added to the overnight score Glamorgan were eight wickets down with Middlesex still more than a hundred runs in front.

It was Tom Helm who finished things off, trapping Timm van der Gugten lbw before bowling Michael Hogan when Glamorgan's No. 11 had a massive swing at a ball that crashed into his stumps.

The performance of the Middlesex bowlers will leave them with some intriguing selection issues going forward. Roland-Jones, Helm, Martin Andersson and Shaheen Shah Afridi were all excellent in this game. With Ethan Bamber and Tim Murtagh waiting in the wings, it will be interesting to see who misses out in the coming matches.

For Glamorgan, it will be a case of the team who were on the field in this match finding a way to replicate their performances from the victory over Nottinghamshire in the last round of the County Championship.

Peter Handscombe, the Middlesex captain, was pleased with his side's performance and full of praise for Roland-Jones, who missed four months of the 2021 season with a knee injury.

"That's pretty close to the blueprint that we want to play," he said. "We have been doing a lot of work on our identity and how we want to go about it as a group. That was very, very impressive.

"We missed [Roland-Jones] last year for quite a long period of the season so it is great to see him back, clean bill of health and just bowling beautifully. He didn't miss, he just came in and to be relentless on his line and length, credit to him, he has obviously done a lot of work to get his body right and then in pre-season he has come out better and stronger for it."