Bowler holds off Durham's charge

A stern half century from Peter Bowler (62*) has helped extricate Somerset from peril late on day two of his team's County Championship match against Durham at Chester-le-Street. Together with Graham Rose (15*), Bowler added an unbeaten 56 for the seventh wicket to steer Somerset to relative safety at 144/6 - in response to Durham's 292 - by the close.

Bowler's steadiness in a crisis has often seen him mount rescue acts for the men from the south-west, but even he must have felt a certain sense of frustration at his teammates' general inability to survive on a perfectly reasonable pitch this time around. As the score plummeted toward 88/6, Jamie Cox (5) lost his leg stump to a skidding ball from Melvyn Betts; Marcus Trescothick (17) was bowled by one that Simon Brown seamed back into him; the labouring Piran Holloway (14) was trapped on the crease by John Wood; Neil Killeen found the edge of the bat of Keith Parsons (1); Rob Turner (3) failed to ground his push off bat and pad to short cover; and then Ian Blackwell (10) became Wood's third victim when wicketkeeper Gary Pratt clutched a superb left handed catch. It was not a particularly edifying performance and Rose's relative comfort in surviving until stumps, while a badly needed development, said as much.

Earlier in the day, Durham had added seventy-seven runs to its own score before last man Brown fell in the opening over after lunch. Typically wholehearted commitment to the cause from both Brown (10) and Betts (33*) had seen a valuable thirty-three runs added for the last wicket of an innings which had threatened to subside quickly after the long vigil of opener Jon Lewis (115) had ended only a matter of minutes into the day.