By Edward Hall
June 24 2002

Wales beat England by the surprisingly large margin of 8 wickets at Sophia Gardens in the inaugural match between the two teams. Wales were led to victory by two players who both have international experience with England, Robert Croft and Steve James. Whether too much can be read into a match like this, in which some of the England batsmen fell to loose shots is debatable, but the facts do not lie, and after restricting the long English batting order to 189 for 8, the Welsh top 3 batted well in the knowledge that only 4 an over was needed.

England set off in the morning like 300 would be the par for the course, with openers Marcus Trescothick, acting as captain in this game, and Nick Knight looking for a bright start. At one point, it looked like he would continue the form that he found for Somerset against Glamorgan last year, but he fell for 38, caught by his county team mate Steffan Jones at third man.

Knight had already gone, snapped up by David Hemp at point off the bowling of Jacques Kallis, and when Darren Thomas picked up Michael Vaughan and Graeme Thorpe, the two men who could have nudged and nurdled the Welsh bowlers round during the middle of the innings, England were reduced to 55 for 4 at the end of the 14th over.

Paul Collingwood and Ronnie Irani, back in the England fold after a good start to the season with Essex, seemed to calm things down a bit with a partnership of 32, but Robert Croft showed what a good one-day bowler he is in the middle of the innings, picking up both of them within 20 minutes of each other. Alec Stewart, as befits a man of his international experience, played sensibly in his innings of 39, hitting only two boundaries, but two run outs towards the end of the innings kept the target down to 190.

Faced with a necessary run rate of less than 4 an over, Wales opened their reply with Robert Croft and Steve James, looking to play the anchor role throughout the innings. At the start of the match, the Welsh players needed to believe they could win and that they were just playing a strong county side, but the county select XI did not even look that strong when Matthew Hoggard bowled a 10 ball over and conceded 24 runs in the process. Croft, as usual, got the innings off to a good start, smiting 30 off 26 balls before being bowled by a James Kirtley yorker.

James, now joined by David Hemp, instead of Kallis (who was expected to bat at 3), continued to bat fluently. Andy Flintoff was the only England seamer to control the run rate, and by the time Jeremy Snape got through 9 overs of off-spin fairly economically, run rate was not the issue as Wales reached their target with 9 and a half overs to spare.