Luke Fletcher thrives, then toils, as Nottinghamshire’s Championship hopes fade

JAMES COYNE AT TRENT BRIDGE: In the picture-perfect autumn sunshine the home side saw their title aspirations take a seismic and perhaps irreparable blow

Nottingham (second day of four): Nottinghamshire 296, Yorkshire 73 & 169-3

Scorecard

So much has been written about Luke Fletcher over the last decade, it’s sometimes hard to separate style from substance. 

You wonder just how much of the adoration is about a pining for the days – not that long ago – when the LV=Insurance County Championship dictated the domestic schedule, professional cricketers stuffed their gullets with lager and fish and chips at every opportunity and didn’t care so much for their brand awareness. Rightly or wrongly, Fletcher is often held up as a survivor from that era. 

And, for all his natural good humour, there must have been times when that reputation has irritated him – for he is a serious practitioner of his art. 

Well, no one can seriously doubt his substance as a cricketer after this season. Fletcher has been probably the outstanding bowler of the 2021 County Championship. He’s taken 66 wickets and counting – more than anyone else in the country this season. 

As things stand, he’s just two off Andre Adams’ decisive haul of 2010 when he bowled Nottinghamshire to their last Championship title. Before them, the last bowler to have taken more for the county was the West Indies overseas quick Vasbert Drakes, who chalked up 80 wickets in the 17-match programme of 1999. 

It became a lot more difficult this morning for Fletcher’s wickets to lead to the same outcome as Adams’ did 11 years ago. That’s probably about right, too, since Notts were beaten home and away by Warwickshire in the first group stage, and that was before their stinging defeat down at the Ageas Bowl last week ejected them from pole position. 

^{It was a landmark day for Joey Evison}

Still, if you dropped into Trent Bridge this year, the chances are Fletcher was nicking someone off; that’s why his wicketkeeper Tom Moores is top of the dismissals chart in the country. Fletcher has restored morale and purpose to a red-ball team that was listing so badly they had not won a first-class match in 1,043 days. 

We all know he doesn’t have express pace, but when you’re landing it on a sixpence, booming it away and decking it this way and that, with occasionally steepling bounce, then you don’t really need anything else in this country. He tends to play on competitive surfaces in Championship cricket at Trent Bridge, but they’re rarely lush green tops either. The reason he does so well is that he knows exactly what he is doing in the kind of conditions he encounters week-in, week-out. 

And he is a deceptively robust athlete. You have to be to have bowled more than 400 overs in the Championship season, not to mention a further 41 in the Vitality Blast, 22 in the Royal London Cup and 13 in The Hundred (though strictly speaking I should be calling them ‘sets’). 

And, with one of Hampshire or Lancashire bound to win their match, the chances are Fletcher won’t be getting a bonus Bob Willis Trophy match in which to top up his first-class stats, unless Warwickshire run aground against Somerset at Edgbaston over the next two days. (A few county pros will have their eye on a Spanish golf course before then anyway, you imagine.)

Fletcher was irresistibly potent early on the second day of this final Championship match against Yorkshire. It was the reunion for Notts’ 1981 Championship-winning squad in The Boundary’s Edge today, and a great day for it too with the sun beating down from seamless blue skies on the autumn equinox. 

But Notts’ slender hopes of winning the 2021 crown were all but burned off when their last pair, Joey Evison and Dane Paterson, were unable to scramble eight more runs from the last wicket to scrape them up to 300 and a third batting point. 

Evison, unbeaten on a fine fifty overnight, was lbw to a ball from Jordan Thompson which appeared from the press box to be slanting down the legside; replays backed up that impression, but Rob Bailey had made his decision and Notts were bowled out for 296 – and therefore reliant on results turning in their favour at Edgbaston and Aigburth. 

Not that you’d have known it from the way Fletcher was running in to bowl, and the way the Notts fielders were urging him on. 

In his second over he had George Hill caught at slip, then cleaned up Tom Kohler-Cadmore with the next ball, propping forward to no avail. Yorkshire were 5 for 2. Will Fraine clipped his next ball off middle stump, but a few overs later he too nicked Fletcher behind. 

The change bowlers Evison and Paterson did the rest – and 21 minutes after lunch Yorkshire were dismissed for 71 in 29.2 overs, their lowest Championship total in three years, but their third successive score of 117 or lower. 

With the pendulum so far in their favour, there was little reason for Steven Mullaney not to enforce the follow-on. But the sun continued to beam down, moisture lifted from the pitch, and the Dukes ball chosen at the start of the second innings just didn’t swing as much as the one in the first. You can see why the modern cricketer is so averse to enforcing the follow on. 

^{Adam Lyth's job is only half done}

As so often is the case in these situations, a team is able to restore some pride when they bat again. Their only wicket before Adam Lyth shepherded his side past 150 came through an excellent run out of Hill by sub fielder Calvin Harrison, though two more did go down right before the end to leave Yorkshire 169 for 3, 54 behind.

Fletcher began the second innings needing three more wickets to overtake Adams’s 2010 haul, but he wasn’t having it so easy this time. In fact, nothing went his way as the Yorkshire batsmen were able to play him much easier off the front foot, even drive him down the ground. He cut a quietly frustrated figure when Bailey turned down an lbw shout for Kohler-Cadmore’s wicket towards the end of a fruitless six-over spell after tea, unable to find any of the movement that he – in all honesty – needs to be a threat.  

Try explaining this kind of subtlety to the dogmatic Twittersphere, but the whole day was a reminder of how misleading it can be to judge a pitch early on in its life. This one was olive green yesterday but was browning off into a decent batting wicket as early as the second afternoon. 

That’s the endless fascination of red-ball cricket, the way conditions change, and fortunes ebb and flow with them. From the elation of being on a hat-trick in the morning to being made to look pedestrian a couple of hours later. All 10 wickets were taken by one set of bowlers in 29.2 overs; none at all taken by the same lot for the next 58.2. 

Luke Fletcher has seen so much cricket, he will appreciate it and embrace it better than most. Such is the equanimity of the man, he was still sharing jokes with fans in the Radcliffe Road Lower from mid-on as Yorkshire came back into the game. It’s not hard to see why people adore him so.