Borthwick, Muchall defy Magoffin fightback

The sun-hatted scrutineers were out in numbers during the tea interval on the second day of this match at Arundel. With 12 wickets having fallen in less than a half a day's cricket, it was only proper that pitch inspectors, although so far only the amateur variety, would take an interest in the wicket on which batsmen were struggling so piteously.

Sussex crumpled from 57 for 2 to 135 for 8 before their last two wickets added 66 runs. That immensely skilled seamer, Chris Rushworth, collected a season's best 6 for 49. Then Durham, blessed with a 100-run lead if you please, lost four wickets inside the first five overs of their second innings, all of them to Steve Magoffin, a bowler probably intent on avenging his mauling by Mark Stoneman on the first morning. He was successful too: Stoneman survived one ball before edging the 6ft 4ins bowler to Luke Wright at third slip. Magoffin is lean and he had a hungry look; such bowlers are often dangerous.

Even as he departed, Stoneman gave the Castle pitch a reproachful glance, thus offering a hint to the teatime jurists. Yet the evening session offered a corrective to the view that this was a wicket on which only an in-form Bradman could survive. As the ball gradually lost shine and hardness, Scott Borthwick and Gordon Muchall, the latter playing his second vital innings of the game, added 118 runs in 32 overs before Luke Wells turned one past Borthwick's outside edge when the Durham No. 3 had made a 74 studded with fine shots. Borthwick has made 610 Division One runs this season; he is currently a batsman who bowls a few leggies.

By the close Paul Collingwood's side had a lead of 268, although they had also lost Ryan Pringle, bowled by a ball from Tim Linley which appeared reluctant to leave the Sussex earth. But Muchall is 66 not out and Durham have power to add. They are now very warm favourites to win this game, especially as they have four seamers keen to exploit a wicket that has helped new ball bowlers and offered occasional low bounce, especially to those operating at the Castle End, from which 23 of the 26 wickets have been taken. All the same, since batting had looked so relatively straightforward after tea, it is fair to ask what had made it so damned difficult during the first half of the day.

The first part of an answer must focus on the Sussex batting. An innings in which ten players reached double figures but only the No. 9, George Dockrell, managed more than 25 told its own story. Ed Joyce's batsmen had not found it difficult to get in but they had discovered that it was sometimes hard to stay in. Moreover, some had been complicit in their own departures, notably Luke Wright, who groped at one from Rushworth but only nicked a catch to wicketkeeper Michael Richardson, and Joyce himself, who steered John Hastings to Keaton Jennings in the gully.

Wright and Joyce were two of the six wickets to fall in 90 minutes as the home side lost any realistic chance of matching Durham's total. Others fell to Graham Onions, who had Matt Machan brilliantly caught by Jennings, who half-dived to his right to complete a one-handed catch and to Paul Coughlin, who had Ben Brown caught behind for 15.

It was left to Rushworth, a bowler for whom inaccuracy seems a form of heresy, to clean up both Ajmal Shahzad, who is now fit to bat but not to bowl on this game, and Chris Nash, who was laid low with an unspecified illness on the second day and did not bowl either. Sussex have not had their troubles to seek at Arundel.

Magoffin's straight hitting ensured that the follow-on was saved, although it was unlikely that Durham would have enforced it. Then, after the Australian had become Rushworth's sixth victim when he edged the seamer to Collingwood at first slip, the loanees Dockrell and Linley put on 40 for the last wicket, Dockrell finishing unbeaten on 37 not out.

In a game which seems almost a throwback to the best years of three-day cricket, a deficit of 100 is enormous but for 20 minutes Magoffin did not make it seem so. Having settled his account with Stoneman, he had Jennings caught behind with the fifth ball of the innings and then brought a couple back off the pitch to take out Collingwood's middle pole and to scatter Richardson's middle and off. The crowd, whose silence in the first session had been curiously at odds with the festival atmosphere at this cricketing arboretum, suddenly burst into joyous life.

Borthwick and Muchall put the stopper in much of that jollification and Sussex will have to bat as well as they have done this season and more, to win this game. Indeed, it may have been an idea for some of Joyce's players to pause at Arundel's famous gap in the trees and glance over the Arun River valley, Amberley Castle and the Downs. It is truly a view to calm the weary and heavy-laden cricketer, however many overs of Rushworth he must face on the morrow.