Fifty-five overs and two balls. On the fourth afternoon at Taunton, with Essex refusing to fold and a target still to be knocked off, Somerset gave Jack Leach the ball and then more or less left him there. The 35-year-old left-armer bowled, and bowled again, and kept dropping it on the same tiring length until the resistance finally cracked: five for 81, match figures of nine for 118, and a county that has never won the County Championship close enough to see it.
Somerset’s eight-wicket win took 22 points from the round and moved them to within two of leaders Nottinghamshire. Division One has rarely been tighter. As ESPNcricinfo put it after a separate finish at Southampton, six teams can still be considered in the title race and as many as seven are in, or could be dragged into, the relegation fight. Sunday was the day the table stopped making sense.
Jack Leach wears Essex down at Taunton
Essex resumed on 314 for 3, three runs ahead, with the pair who had rescued them still together. Charlie Allison, 21, starting the day on 105, went on to 114 from 254 balls; Matt Critchley made 94 from 236. Somerset’s captain Lewis Gregory declared himself fit to bowl after bruising a hip in the field, but his two overs went the way of the previous evening.
Then Leach found the edge. Critchley was taken by Tom Abell, juggling, at second slip with the score 339, and at 346 for 5 James Rew held the catch that ended Allison’s innings. Dean Elgar’s 56 was long gone; Essex were bowled out for 412. Somerset needed 102 and had them by 3.45pm in 19.2 overs, Tom Lammonby unbeaten on 39 and Josh Thomas making 31. BBC Sport noted it was the 35th time Leach has taken five in a first-class innings — and, per ESPNcricinfo, the first Championship match Somerset have won without Craig Overton, away for the birth of his daughter, since September 2019.
A relegation scrap that will not settle either
At the Utilita Bowl, Dom Bess took his first five-wicket haul of the season — 5 for 103, while standing in as captain with Jonny Bairstow off the field with a hand injury — to see Yorkshire home by 39 runs. Toby Albert’s 57 had given Hampshire hope of chasing 278; they fell short, and now sit 33 points adrift of Yorkshire and in real danger of a first relegation since 2014.
Leicestershire, meanwhile, won for the second match running after taking nothing from their first seven. Ian Holland’s 5 for 19 in 24 overs gave the home captain nine wickets in the match, and Ajaz Patel bowled his 29 overs unchanged for 3 for 41, including the wicket of Kiran Carlson for 99. BBC Sport reported that the match officials, led by referee Ian Ramage, asked the ECB’s pitch and grounds adviser Andy Mackay to inspect the Grace Road surface once the game had finished, so the 42-run win comes with a loose end. The Guardian’s day-four coverage signed off on the obvious fixture: Nottinghamshire travel to third-placed Warwickshire at Edgbaston on Thursday, having watched the Bears win by one wicket at the weekend.
The England subplot nobody at Taunton raised
Leach has 39 Test caps, and both ESPNcricinfo and the BBC reached the same tentative conclusion in their match reports: figures like nine for 118 suggest he may yet add to them. That is a reporter’s inference rather than a selection signal, and England’s attack at Headingley last week was built almost entirely on pace, Joe Root’s side winning the first Test by an innings inside three days. The second Test against Pakistan begins at Lord’s on Thursday.
What is not in doubt is the value of the spell itself. Somerset have chased this title for the whole of their history, and have spent the past decade being told they are close. On Sunday the closest thing they have to a certainty bowled 55.2 overs on a fourth day and won them a match they had to win. Two points, four rounds, and a 35-year-old holding the whole thing together.
