ScorecardHe glaring sun bore down on the Trinidad and Tobago fielders at Sabina Park, Jamaica, in the first session of the second day of the Carib Challenge final. So did the weight of a substantial 172-run first innings deficit against the Jamaicans, built on the back of an inspired knock of 116 from Brendan Nash, his second for Jamaica, and second versus T&T this season.At the close, T&T were trying to make inroads into a challenging deficit, very aware that they must first overhaul a daunting lead before they can think about setting Jamaica a competitive fourth innings target. Openers Daren Ganga and Adrian Barath set about on a rescue mission and, by the close, had given T&T a good start of 43 without loss, a three-wicket improvement over Thursday’s first session. They might have had something in the vicinity of 20 more runs, but the Sabina Park outfield, which has seen much better days, was effective in slowing up the ball towards the boundary.Their reply was not without blemish, though, as both batsmen were let off, Ganga dropped by Nash in slip on eight and Barath put down by Jamaica’s first day hero, left arm spinner Nikita Miller, on 14.What made Nash’s knock-he was unbeaten overnight on 56-special in Jamaica’s first innings was not dazzling strokeplay, but disciplined application at a time when Jamaica were 29 for three on the first day. Then he featured in a partnership of 65 with Brendan Parchment, before batting throughout the morning session to put on 106 with Jamaican captain Tamar Lambert-who scored an even 50-raising a well-deserved century in the process.With that batting effort handing Jamaica a handsome advantage, it will be an uphill task for T&T’s batsmen to get them back on track. They did get that slim chance, though, thanks to pacers Mervyn Dillon, Ravi Rampaul and Richard Kelly, who prised out four of Jamaica’s last six wickets in the space of 93 runs just after Nash had brought up his fifth first-class ton.Lendl Simmons was one bright spark for T&T behind the stumps replacing Denesh Ramdin, who did not return to the field yesterday after suffering heavy bruising and swelling around his right eye. He was hit by a Daren Powell bouncer while batting on the opening morning. Simmons snapped up whatever came his way, holding onto four catches provided by the Jamaicans, including the prize scalp of Nash, and wicket-keeper Carlton Baugh Jr.The other good news for T&T w as that Ramdin seemed to be okay yesterday evening, with just a swollen eye, and even managed to toss up a few balls to number three batsman Darren Bravo during some batting practice after play.In Jamaica’s innings, Nash and Lambert were content to wait patiently for T&T off-spinner Amit Jaggernauth to make the odd mistake. They preferred the pace offered by Rampaul and Dillon, though, and scored easily. Even when the runs dried up, with the spin duo of Jaggernauth and chinaman bowler Dave Mohammed operating in tandem, they still played within themselves, picking up the odd boundary in the process.The pudgy Jamaican skipper was no slouch between the wickets, running all but four of his runs, while Nash was severe on anything just outside off stump and left alone anything that bounced, or was fairly wide.At the 200-run mark, Lambert, who had been living a charmed life in the latter part of his innings, found T&T skipper Daren Ganga, who took a brilliant right-handed catch just off the ground at wide mid on off Dillon. Just 31 runs later it was Baugh heading back to pavilion for 17, top-edging Rampaul behind to Simmons.Jerome Taylor came and played an enterprising unbeaten cameo of 27 (four fours, 29 balls), drilling boundaries off Rampaul and Kelly, but lost the rest of the Jamaica tail, Dillon removing Powell (14) caught Mohammed at backward point, in between Kelly’s caught behind dismissals of Nikita Miller (11) and Odean Brown (4). Once T&T had mopped up the Jamaican tail-not without resistance-it was time to attempt some repair work after their first innings collapse.The question is, with the pitch more conducive to stroke play than on the first morning, can their batting improve well enough to allow them to challenge Jamaica?

The match between Knights and Cape Cobras in Kimberley was tied after rain ended play with the scores level on the D/L method during the chase. Pursuing 182, Rilee Rossouw made an explosive start, scoring 29 at a strike-rate of 241 to lead Knights to 40 in 2.5 overs, when he was dismissed. Wickets began to fall before partnerships could be built after that, and though they maintained a run-rate of close to 10, Knights had slipped to 119 for 5 when rain ended play after the 13th over. As it turned out, they were on par with the D-L score. In their innings, the Cape Cobras top three produced quick and substantial contributions to lead their team to 181 for 4. Andrew Puttick made 51, Stiaan van Zyl 48 and Owais Shah 45.Half-centuries from Martin van Jaarsveld and Farhaan Berhadien helped set up Titans‘ 29-run victory against Warriors in East London. The pair lifted Titans from 45 for 3 in the sixth over, after they had decided to bat, with a 94-run partnership. van Jaarsveld made 77 off 46 balls and Behardien an unbeaten 54 off 37. Both batsmen hit three sixes, and Titans finished with 174 for 5 from 20 overs. Titans’ decision to open the defense with Roelof van der Merwe’s spin paid off as JJ Smuts was dismissed in the first over. van der Merwe went on to have figures of 2 for 21 in four overs. Left-arm spinner Paul Harris also had a good outing, taking 3 for 22, his wickets being those of the Warriors’ top-scorer Ashwell Price, for 49, and middle-order batsmen Justin Kreusch and Kelly Smuts. The Warriors lost wickets at regular intervals and were restricted to 145 for 7 in their 20 overs.Impi made their debut against Lions in Potchefstroom and it was not a happy one. They were restricted and dismissed for 92 in 19.5 overs in pursuit of 154. Only two Impi batsmen – Cobus Pienaar and Ryan Canning – made double-figure scores. Ethan O’Reilly had figures of 4-1-4-2 for Lions, and Aaron Phangsio and Dwaine Pretorius also took two wickets apiece. Lions did not perform impressively with the bat either, slumping from 89 for 2 to 108 for 7 in 16.3 overs, before Chris Morris blasted 31 off 13 balls to lead them to 153.

Marcus Stoinis did not get to play a single game for Delhi Daredevils after the franchise signed him for the 2015 IPL season, but the time he spent with the team enabled him to work on his batting against spin. More particularly – and unusually, given the IPL is a Twenty20 competition – his defence against spin.Stoinis displayed that facet of his game admirably during his 179-ball 77 in Australia A’s first four-day match against India A last week, against a spin attack comprising Amit Mishra and Pragyan Ojha on a slow turner at the MA Chidambaram Stadium.”I was pretty lucky to go to the IPL and spend seven or eight weeks with Delhi,” Stoinis said during a media interaction on Monday. “We had a great set-up, and Gary Kirsten was a great coach there. He helped me a lot, and speaking to JP Duminy and those South African players, and then had Yuvraj [Singh] help me a lot as well.”Sri [Sridharan Sriram], who’s involved with us now [as Australia A’s batting consultant during the tour] – he’s from Delhi Daredevils too. I spent a lot of time with him, one-on-one, and he talked to me a lot, not just the conditions and the wickets, but the different types of bowlers you come across and the different plans, probably more of an Indian style of approaching the game than an Australian style.”So my stance is a little bit lower than it has been, and I worked a lot – even though it might be the IPL – I worked a lot on my defence against the spinners. I found, once I could defend, I could understand the flight path of the ball, what’s happening off the wicket a little bit better, and before you know you can attack a lot easier. I’m sure it will help with Twenty20 as well as the longer format.”Recently, in a development that will no doubt please his IPL franchise, Stoinis struck six sixes in an over during a practice match against the National Indigenous Squad in Brisbane, in an over bowled by the medium-pacer Brendan Smith. Stoinis was quick to downplay the feat.”It was a short boundary and it wasn’t probably as good as someone like Yuvraj hitting six sixes,” he said. “There were two pull shots early on and a couple over long-on and one over midwicket, that sort of thing. Bit of a slog.”Stoinis made his first-class debut six years ago, when he was 19, but only got to play three games for Western Australia before he lost his contract. That prompted Stoinis to move to Victoria in a bid to rejuvenate his career; it worked, but not before a four-year wait for his Sheffield Shield return.”At that stage, [losing my Western Australia contract] was sort of, it was probably the best thing that could have happened,” Stoinis said. “It can come pretty quickly when you’re young, you move into the system and you go from the Under-19s Australian team and it moves quickly, but I wasn’t ready to play, I don’t think.”After that, I sat down with my family and that sort of thing and said, look, if I want to play cricket for the rest of my life, where do I want to live, and I picked Melbourne. They were the strongest state at the time, some great players there, so yes, I moved there, it took me a couple of years to get in, but that’s how I made my decision.”Stoinis knew it would be harder for him to break into a strong side. “But the thinking behind my decision was more that I believed I was going to get there, and may as well do it in a place that I feel comfortable in. I’ve had a few great coaches that have been involved with me over those two years to get me into the team, with Greg Shipperd who was the coach there, Kim Hughes is my batting coach in Perth and he flies to Melbourne to see me, and the sports psychologist Dave Diggle, who’s helped me a lot as well.”Stoinis picked up two wickets in India A’s second innings with his medium-pace, and though his 13 first-class wickets so far have come at an underwhelming average of 55.69, he has been working hard on his bowling in order to become a genuine allrounder.”I’ve always been a batter, since I started, so that’s a change of mindset for me, really,” he said. “I can see how important it is, because as much as I love my batting, the bowling might be what separates me from a lot of batters, so it could be a lot more important than I have given it credit in the past.”But yes, that’s the plan. I want to be a genuine allrounder, been working hard on my bowling, spent four or five weeks in Brisbane before we came here, just bowling, pretty much. Batting was the side note to that. So it will be an important string, I think.”There were no speedguns at the MA Chidambaram Stadium, but Stoinis thinks he clocks around 130kph. “130 to 150,” he said, deadpan. “My bouncer is 150, I think.”

ScorecardMichael Yardy leaves the field for the final time in first-class cricket•Getty Images

Since this match was played during the university term, the large press box at Headingley, which is situated in a complex owned by Leeds Beckett University, was being used for lectures on the final day of this game.Thus, while the mighty Yorkshire bowling attack sent Sussex’s rather stunned cricketers down to the Second Division, students sat in serried rows with the blinds firmly down in the Kilner Auditorium and listened to no doubt worthy lectures on important subjects such as thermodynamics or computer science.Quite right too, perhaps, but for the undergraduates, many of whom were keen cricket fans, it must have been frustration itself. Jack Brooks removed the top three in Sussex’s order in one of the finer new-ball spells you will see and all they could hear were muffled cheers amid the theorems. “There’s music in the names I used to know / And magic when I heard them long ago”, wrote Thomas Moult in “The Names”, a golden age poem written in the persona of a cricket-loving adult remembering his schooldays.Certainly drama students might have learned something from watching the cricket on this last day of the season. Sussex began their innings needing to bat out 92 overs for the draw or score 309 runs to win. The achievement of either goal would have prolonged their five-year stay in the First Division, but they never looked like reaching either objective. Yorkshire’s bowlers saw to that.First it was Brooks, cruising in as smoothly as a sports car from the Kirkstall Lane. First he bowled a swinging full toss at the dreadfully out-of-form Ed Joyce and the Sussex skipper inside-edged it onto his stumps; then makeshift opener Chris Jordan was leg before on the back foot for 20; and in what was only Brooks’s sixth over, Matt Machan chased a wideish ball and feathered a catch to Jonny Bairstow. Sussex were 39 for 3 in the 12th over and there was already a horrid gash below their waterline.The crowd at Headingley enjoyed it all hugely, of course, but the students in their lecture theatre, whatever they were thinking, saw none of it. “Drone on, O teacher, you can’t trouble me,” Moult’s poem continues. “If you choose to keep us here while cricket’s in the air, / You must expect our minds to wander down the roads to Leicester, Lord’s and Leeds …”And at Leeds this final morning, things got rapidly worse for Sussex as Tim Bresnan joined in the fun. He bowled Chris Nash through the gate for 17 and induced Luke Wright to drive most unwisely at a wider delivery of full length. Sussex were 63 for 5 at lunch and the writing was as clear upon the walls as the equations were on the flip-charts. When you only win one of your final 11 games, as Sussex have done, you are going to struggle; and when your seam bowlers – James Anyon, Ajmal Shahzad, Chris Jordan – are not fit for most or all of the season, while your batsmen are not in form, you are going to find it desperately hard.Hampshire may have produced a great escape worthy of Steve McQueen on his motorbike but Sussex’s relegation is hardly an enormous surprise.There was some resistance, though, and it came from Michael Yardy, who was batting for the final time in his career, and Ben Brown, who passed a thousand runs for the season during his innings of 42. The pair added 79 in 20 overs that offered some hope that a defence worthy of mythology might be mounted. Their partnership stretched deep into the afternoon, by which time a party of schoolchildren had joined the crowd, a splash of purple amid the dark anoraks and fleeces.Indeed, many spectators at Headingley probably had mixed feelings this final afternoon. They were watching their team achieve a record 11th Championship victory and win the First Division by 68 points, which is greater than the margin between runners-up Middlesex and bottom-placed Worcestershire. This is a great Yorkshire team and it must be a wonderful time to follow the White Rose.At the same time there were many who might empathise with the phrase , the evocative title chosen by the John Arlott for one of his books. For it connotes not just a physical presence but a deeper commitment. “Where’s John?” friends would ask Arlott’s mother, only to receive the answer: “Oh, he’s gone with the cricketers.” And so he was, for much of the rest of his life.And so they were at Headingley when they stood to applaud Yardy as he left first-class cricket after gloving an attempted hook to Alex Lees at first slip. There was no more touching sight than the Yorkshire team queueing up to shake the hand of the player they had just dismissed.Yardy’s dismissal by Bresnan for 41 was followed twelve balls later by that of Brown, the Sussex wicketkeeper clipping Adil Rashid straight to short leg, where Jack Leaning grabbed a brilliant catch. That left Sussex on 142 for 7 and, although the last three wickets took a shade under an hour to fall, there was now no doubt which way the river was flowing. Rashid helped himself to a couple more scalps and Adam Lyth, on his 28th birthday, had Ashar Zaidi leg before for 47.At ten past three Chris Liddle was plumb enough to Rashid and the celebrations began on the outfield even as the dull realisation sunk in among the Sussex players. Dickie Bird presented the County Championship trophy to Andrew Gale, who has now received it three times in successive games. Mark Robinson, the Sussex coach, offered dignified congratulations to both Yorkshire and Hampshire; he refused to make elaborate excuses; he is a cricket man.The supporters gathered on the outfield and watched their players begin the latest of what have already been many celebrations. And, as is often the case at this time of year, the spectators were slow to leave, reluctant, perhaps, to leave one home for another. Eventually they drifted away, though, and soon they must follow the different rhythms of autumn. But it will not be long before they are thinking of next April when there will be music in the names once again and we shall be gone with the cricketers.

Scorecard4:55