County Championship Division One

Yorkshire 202 and 283 beat Somerset 224 and 258 by three runs

SOMERSET fell agonisingly short of their first Championship victory of the season, losing by just three runs against Yorkshire at the Cooper Associates County Ground.

Chasing 262 to win the match, Somerset recovered strongly from 49-4 and looked well set, but the visitors plugged away with regular wickets to restrict the home side.

The match ended in dramatic fashion when, two balls after hitting a six, Jamie Overton was caught off the bowling of Adam Lyth to hand Yorkshire the narrowest of wins.

Starting the day on 101-4, needing a further 161 runs to win, the not out batsmen Adam Hose and Steve Davies began the day solidly and each progressed to half centuries.

The partnership had progressed to 118 when Hose was caught at cover by Peter Handscomb from the bowling of Kyle Carver on 68 and, when Davies was lbw off Adam Lyth for 59 shortly afterwards, the result was back in the balance with Somerset 189-6.

Craig Overton, today called up to England's T20 squad for the three-match series against South Africa, joined the in-form Lewis Gregory in the middle and the duo chipped away at the target.

Again, however, both fell in quick succession as Ryan Sidebottom roared back in to the attack to leave the hosts 242-8, still 20 runs short.

Jack Leach came and went for 1, and last man Dom Bess walked to the wicket to join Jamie Overton with 12 runs still needed.

Overton halved that deficit with a huge hit over long off, but followed that up two balls later with a chip to mid-on that was held by Carver to spark wild Yorkshire celebrations.

The defeat keeps Somerset second bottom in Division One, with only Warwickshire below them.

***

Somerset director of cricket Matt Maynard said: "It’s a very quiet dressing room right now, as you can imagine.

“We won a couple of nail-biters last year – this is the first real nail-biter we’ve had in the County Championship this year, and it didn’t go our way.

“To be fair I thought Ryan Sidebottom bowled a very impressive spell, he got the ball reversing, he was very disciplined in his line length and didn’t give us anything at all, making it tough for us.

“In hindsight you look back and think could we have done this, or done that, but that’s the process of learning with a young batting group – but to get us so close was a great effort from them.

“Every single innings [Tom Abell] has been in on the new ball – either Marcus [Trescothick] or Dean [Elgar] has scored runs, but not together, as we don’t seem to be able to get to 50 or 60 for no wicket.

“[The captaincy] is bound to have an effect on [Abell] because he wants to do well and lead the side through volume of runs.

"The first couple of games he had a technical fault, which he’s worked hard to iron out.

“It’s been a problem all year – batsmen looking good in practice and just not getting those telling innings.

“There’s a lot of hard work to do. It would have been brilliant to get that first win today, and it was a really promising debut from Adam Hose.

“We’re not far away from securing a couple of results, and we know what it’s like if you get on a run and the belief flips a little bit – you start winning the tighter games.

“We’ll have a proper debrief when the emotions have quietened down and the lads are speaking again, but we need to refocus on tomorrow [the Royal London One-Day Cup quarter-final against Nottinghamshire at the County Ground].

“There’s hope when you get so close. If you get hammered, you think ‘where do we go from here?’, but there’s certainly light at the end of the tunnel.

“We encourage our young players to be positive, so it wouldn't be fair to criticise them for getting out to attacking shots.

"There is work to do on our Championship cricket, but getting so close to a target of 262 suggests that we are not far away.”