Emilio Gay leads Northants' fight as Lancashire's young spinners are thwarted

One winter in the late 1980s the Lancashire slow left-armer, Ian Folley, was talking about spin bowling in County Championship matches. It was one of the many eras in the county's history when the team was making regular tilts at the title without ever winning it. "You want to know about pressure?" said Folley. "You turn up at a ground and realise that if it's a spinning track, everyone's looking at me and Simmo [Jack Simmons] to win us the game,' he said. "That's real pressure."

Nearly 40 years later, Jack Morley and Tom Hartley are discovering what Folley was on about. It is a Friday in late July 2023 and they are trying to bowl out Northamptonshire on a wicket that had seen 491.1 overs bowled on it over seven days' play when the present innings began. Areas outside a left-hander's off stump are showing dark craters made by bowlers' footmarks - and Northamptonshire have five left-handers in their top six. In truth, Emirates Old Trafford's Test match pitch is desperate for repair and its winter snooze, so 23-year-old Morley and 25-year-old Hartley are expected to take wickets on it. And they say county cricket is soft…

As things turned out, they didn't manage it, partly because their opponents' youngsters showed that they are also learning a thing or two about pressure. Despite conceding a deficit of 202 runs, Northamptonshire's cricketers, most notably Emilio Gay and Luke Procter but also Sam Whiteman and James Sales, battled as if their First Division survival depended on it and reached the end of the game with five wickets still intact and a lead of 12. The draw changes neither side's position in the table. Procter's team are still bottom of the pile and will need at least a couple of wins in September if that situation is to change. Lancashire are still seventh and that is a disappointment to everyone at the club.

Yet what we witnessed on the ground that was hosting an Ashes match just a week ago was still fascinating stuff, not least because we saw a clutch of cricketers coming slowly to an understanding of their disciplines and skills. Not only Lancashire's spinners, you understand, but also Northamptonshire's Gay, who followed his century in the first innings with a Verdun-esque 61 in the second, a three-hour vigil which was only ended when he came down the track to Hartley and edged a catch to Keaton Jennings at slip.

Gay's was the third wicket to fall. Lancastrian hopes had been raised before lunch, first when Ricardo Vasconcelos was leg before to a ball from Tom Bailey that both jagged back and bounced like a crumpet on lino, and then when the right-handed Justin Broad had been caught at slip by Jennings off a beauty from Morley that turned sharply and took the edge. That wicket, though, only ushered in a 96-run partnership between Gay and Whiteman that sucked 39 overs out of the day and took Northamptonshire a good way closer to the draw that says much for their backbone in a hard summer.

All the same, the draw was nowhere near a done deal when Gay was winkled out and much less so when Whiteman inside-edged a catch off Hartley to George Bell at short leg, who clutched the ball in his right hand and scampered away like a cat with the cream.

But in the very best sense, Procter is a fighter, a quality that was apparent when he was at Lancashire and is no less plain now that he leads Northamptonshire. He lost Saif Zaib, lbw when playing no shot to Luke Wells five overs after tea but Sales joined his skipper and kept him steadfast company for 25 overs. And it says much for Sales' unflappability that Lancashire did not really look like taking a wicket in the final hour of the game. Much, too, for the cricketers on both sides over the past four days that a match which might seem a little dull to anyone casually perusing the scorecard actually offered so much quiet enjoyment to anyone who cared to become engrossed in its ebbs and flows.