Bevan hits Sussex to resounding win

A stunning fourth century in five County Championship innings from Michael Bevan has led Sussex to an emphatic seven wicket win over cellar dweller Middlesex at Southgate this afternoon and to the top of the Division Two standings.

Bevan (173*), who also became the first man to pass one thousand first class runs for the summer in the course of his hand, was in serene touch. He cut, he drove, he pulled, he hooked, and he rarely looked in trouble at any stage during a 193-ball stay replete with twenty-one powerful boundaries and three contemptuous sixes. The New South Welshman's rumoured weakness - an inability to cope with well directed short-pitched bowling - was well tested, but his bat was generally impassable and his defences impregnable. There was one major scare - as he survived a loud lbw appeal in Angus Fraser's third over - but that was as close as Middlesex came to removing him.

If any other statistics were needed to verify the authoritative nature of this latest effort, then the truest measure of the left handed Australian's dominance probably comes in the notion that stubborn nightwatchman James Kirtley (26*) scored less than one sixth of the 166 runs they added in their unbroken stand for the fourth wicket. It was appropriate that Sussex's triumph, which came twenty minutes after lunch, was sealed with a Bevan boundary.

For Middlesex, Phil Tufnell (2/75) again bowled tidily and offered his opponents few cheap runs. But it was yet another day - in the course of a wretched season - when the side's lack of penetration cost it dearly. Needing seven wickets and with as many as 150 runs still available to defend, the home team had come into the day with a realistic chance of victory. But such hopes were easily disassembled: most methodically so in fact.