By Mark Baldwin at The Kia Oval
Result: Surrey 520 & 263/4 drew with Leicestershire 691
Surrey 14pts; Leicestershire 15pts
JAMIE Smith continued his prolific early-season form with an effortless 89 off 109 balls as Surrey batted out day four to secure a draw against Leicestershire at The Kia Oval.
Ollie Pope, who like Smith had made a hundred in Surrey’s first innings, also impressed with an unbeaten 83 as a soporific batting surface ultimately had the last word in a match of 1,474 runs and only 24 wickets.
Surrey, who began their second innings 171 runs adrift at the start of the final day, finished on 263-4 with Ben Foakes alongside Pope on 28 not out.
Smith, who struck two sixes and thirteen sweetly-timed fours, had scored 132 and 166 in his two previous innings and has now plundered 396 runs from his first four knocks of the Rothesay County Championship season at an average of 99.
Leicestershire, newly-promoted to Division One and who lost heavily to Sussex in the opening round of games, will however take a lot of confidence from four days in which they went toe-to-toe with a team which has won three championship titles in the last four years – and were runners-up last September.
They batted with great determination on days two and three to post 691 and go well past Surrey’s first innings of 520, and they also had their moments with the ball on day four.
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Surrey captain Rory Burns fell for a duck to the fifth ball of the morning, chopping on against Ian Holland as he tried to cut a delivery from around the wicket and too close to him for the shot.
And after Smith and Dom Sibley had steadied Surrey with a second wicket partnership of 105 in 28 overs, Leicestershire kept up their outside chance of forcing an upset by removing Sibley on the stroke of lunch for 32 and – later on, after Smith and Pope had overhauled the deficit in their subsequent stand of 71 – snatching two more top-order wickets in an over.
Two short rain delays, though, took 16 overs out of the day’s allocation and, in truth, Surrey always looked comfortable despite losing Sibley, Smith and Dan Lawrence to left-arm spinner Ajaz Patel inside thirteen overs as they slipped to 177-4.
Patel, capped 22 times at Test level by New Zealand, wheeled away from the Pavilion End for much of the morning and afternoon sessions and mainly attempted to exploit the bowlers’ footmarks outside the right handers’ leg stump.
Pope, in particular, was happy enough to pad away those that were not called wides when missing the footmarks and failing to turn, but Patel’s first success came when Sibley guided a catch to backward short leg off the face of his bat.
Smith then top-edged a sweep at Patel and was well caught by a tumbling Tom Scriven on the rope at deep backward square leg, while Lawrence departed for nought when he attempted to pad away another ball fired in from over the wicket and saw it merely clip his front pad on its way into the top of off stump.
There were still 17.3 overs left of the day’s shortened allocation when hands were shaken on the draw at 4.50pm, and with Pope and Foakes having put on an unbroken 86 for the fifth wicket.
“We did some things really well in this game but we were not up to our standards in some disciplines, and we certainly did not want to drop the catches we did in the first part of their innings,” Surrey head coach Gareth Batty said.
“We put the preparation work in pre-season but we have not executed yet in game time and we need to look at that as a group.
“Bowling-wise, it is about the whole unit and not just individuals but I think we have to start being proactive and not reactive out there.
“It’s still very early in the season but we have to brush up some of our skills. Is that a physical thing, or a mental one?
“We have a round off now before our next match so we need to reflect on the fact we didn’t get it right in this game and be much better next time.”
Surrey are next back in Division One action against Essex at The Kia Oval on April 24.
