Procter gives Lancashire a lifeline

Sussex 0 for 0 trail Lancashire 320 (Procter 81, Croft 49, Khawaja 45, Magoffin 4-96) by 320 runs
Scorecard

The Invisible Man, who currently coaches Lancashire, must have been heartened by the outcome at the close of the first day as the Red Rose county embarked upon a match at Hove that realistically they need to win to have a decent chance of avoiding relegation. To more than double the score after being 148 for 7 was a redoubtable achievement and has given them something to bowl at. If they do go down, they look bent upon going down fighting.

The thought of James Anderson tearing down the hill on the second morning in his first late-season match for nine years will lift Lancashire, and they will have been relieved to have seen Glen Chapple bowling an over without alarm after he needed prolonged treatment on the field on a back twinge which he suffered while ambling an innocuous single. News from Trent Bridge that Gary Keedy had joined Chapple as the only Division One bowler to have taken 500 Championship wickets was a reminder of Chapple's value to the county.

"The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it," was one of the Invisible Man's most thumbed quotes. Just the sort of homily about escaping relegation that he could give to Chapple, the captain, or Gary Yates, the assistant coach, when they discussed the events of the day with him in a Hove hostelry. Clue: The Invisible Man will be the one in the empty chair. People will assume Yates is talking to himself but that's only to be expected when relegation threatens so no-one will mind too much.

Presumably The Invisible Man is Lancashire coach? Somebody must have the job and all the perks and authority and responsibility that goes with it. Replacing the coach who moved on to England - Peter Moores, a man you could not always understand - with a man you could not actually see was always going to be a risk, but Luke Procter's battling unbeaten 81, from 155 balls with only six boundaries, was the sort of defiance that you could see, smell and taste.

With Lancashire starting this round of matches second bottom, 12 points down on Durham and Middlesex, and with two matches left compared to their three, Procter stated that they had no time for fripperies. "All it takes to get along in this here town is a little shit, grit and mother-wit," as Procter, if he was playing the part of the pushcart man in HG Wells' novel, would have told the Invisible Man. Procter would have been a good pushcart man.

It is tempting - perhaps too tempting - to draw a comparison with Jos Buttler, who fell hooking a bouncer from Steve Magoffin early in the afternoon session to deep backward square. Buttler did enough in his final season at Somerset to suggest a growing appetite for playing the pushcart man when necessary, but he had just come off the back off a diet of one-day cricket and he did fall into Magoffin's trap.

Lancashire lost four wickets before lunch. The captain, Paul Horton, attracted such notoriety after his dissent in the NatWest Blast final that a former Lancashire opener, and England captain, Michael Atherton, dubbed it the worst dissent for many years. An ECB ban for two matches was eventually announced. Horton, adjudged lbw to Magoffin, accepted his fate with equanimity.

Talking of suspensions, Ashwell Prince's duck, caught at second slip, will have found approval in Yorkshire, who are still seething over Prince's part in the suspension of their captain, Andrew Gale, which has ruled him out of their potential Championship decider at Trent Bridge. There was a failure, too, for Karl Brown, rousingly caught by Ed Joyce at third slip.

It was Usman Khawaja who initially held Lancashire together until he fell for 45, cutting at the left-arm spinner of Ashar Zaidi, who also defeated Tom Smith on the sweep and Anderson, last out reverse sweeping, to finish with 3 for 39.

Sussex has been starved of cricket: none for 19 days, no Championship cricket for nigh on two months. They had clearly been left wanting more. Sussex even had to undertake two emergency scorecard reprints to meet demand. The Lancashire members who had arrived early to claim the best deckchairs filled in those scorecards in the final session with an optimism they could barely have anticipated as their last three wickets more than doubled the score.