Day 2: No play due to rain.
Day 3: Shining Knight has timing to perfection
By Christopher Martin-Jenkins at Edgbaston
Third day of four: Warwicks 374-5 v Lancs
WHEN a four-day match does not start until the third day there is no option but to contrive a finish. There will be a double forfeiture, no doubt, today and a chance for both sides in a match each need to win, but anyone looking at the scorecard and imagining that there was anything soft about the 192 by Nick Knight would be wrong.
For 6.5 hours he batted with excellent judgment and the straightest of bats until falling to a fine catch in the deep by the substitute Jamie Haynes shortly before the close.
His timing was excellent in every way. Having recalled him for the Old Trafford Test, the England selectors might have been embarrassed if he had made nought while the deposed Steve James was scoring 121 for Glamorgan. Instead he advertised their wisdom on a good pitch of even, easy pace, with a tinge of green to encourage the seamers and just a little turn for Mike Watkinson's off-spin.
Knight has given Lancashire's strong batting a hard act to follow today. Their captain, Wasim Akram, was missing again, this time because of a groin injury, and a seam attack of Martin, Chapple, Austin, Green and, briefly, Flintoff - well deployed by John Crawley, the new Alec Stewart - may not equate to Donald, Pollock, Klusener, Kallis and Cronje. Nevertheless this was not at all a bad rehearsal and Mike Atherton, his opening partner on Thursday, is unlikely to match his power and range of stroke today.
It was Knight's highest first-class score and one of the purest innings he has played. He hit 21 fours and until he had passed 150 he did not hit the ball in the air. His previous highest score, 174 against Kent, was made in his first season for Warwickshire four years ago. He has scored three first-class hundreds this season but only nine in all since moving to Edgbaston. His career has had its troughs but this looks like being the highest peak yet.
In his last four innings in all competitions he has now scored 498 runs and if the other three hundreds were as commanding as this, with decisive footwork and little playing and missing outside the off-stump, their quality must have been high.
His opening partner, Michael Powell, played solidly too, escaping one chance to short-leg when 18 but otherwise matching Knight run for run through the morning session and reaching fifty soon after lunch from the same number of balls before edging a drive at an outswinger from Glenn Chapple. The best of Lancashire's bowlers on the day followed up with a ball which swung in to knock back David Hemp's middle stump, bringing in a left-hander whose trough has been a deep one.
Brian Lara hit his first ball confidently through mid-wicket for two, but injured his knee in running and despite a cut and a pull for successive fours off Watkinson he had played and missed often enough to prove his struggles are not over before Graham Lloyd ran him out, backing up, with a direct hit from cover.
Trevor Penney would have been stumped had he not been bowled by a ball which beat him in the air but Dougie Brown enjoyed himself on a sunlit evening with a pugnacious 78-ball fifty.
Day 4: Lara gives Flintoff the scope for power play
By Christopher Martin-Jenkins
Lancs (39-0 & 338-6) bt Warwicks (374-5 & forfeit) by 4 wkts
ANDREW FLINTOFF, the lion cub from Preston, added another cubit to his rapidly growing stature and 18 points to Lancashire's increasingly serious challenge for the championship with an innings of quite remarkable power at Edgbaston yesterday afternoon.
His 70 off 95 balls, with eight fours and two sixes, may not have matched his 34 off one over against Surrey but it saw Lancashire to victory with nine balls in hand in what virtually became a one-innings match played over two days.
The 'virtually' was highly significant, however. How Warwickshire's captain, Brian Lara, allowed himself to be talked into bowling 23 balls in the morning to get Lancashire to the sort of target they fancied chasing in the ``fourth'' innings was a mystery indeed, especially as Ed Giddins was suffering from flu.
Having been gifted 39 before Warwickshire's second-innings forfeiture, they were required to make only 336 in what, because of a relatively brisk over-rate, became 96 overs. The left-handed Nathan Wood laid the base capably before Flintoff came in at 184 for three to bludgeon his side to second place in the table.
It is not easy for a man of Flintoff's size, 6ft 4in and almost as broad, to appear elegant and it is more the weather's fault than his own that he keeps being obliged to play against the clock. It may therefore be something of an illusion that his method still appears to be rough: more the blacksmith at his forge than the artist at his easel.
He has already done enough to be an obvious selection for England's one-day team in the triangular tournament in August and even at 20 he must be considered for Australia. It is not just his strength which impresses but the quickness with which he assesses the length and the facility with which he hits off the back foot.
Warwickshire had five men on the boundary for most of the final session after Lancashire had gone into tea at 190 for three, with Flintoff's innings in its infancy. Lara's best hope of containing them lay with his spinners, Ashley Giles and Neil Smith, but he was fatally concerned with the fact that this meant bowling more overs at the opposition than were necessary.
Two characterless sessions had seen Wood and Mike Atherton establishing the foundations capably, initially against some hostile swing bowling from Giddins. He retired to his bed soon after lunch, leaving Dougie Brown, who had claimed Atherton leg before as he aimed to work to leg, to do most of the bowling with the accurate Giles.
John Crawley stroked four fours in two overs off Brown early in the second session before that combative cricketer avenged himself with a ball which cut back to take the inside edge. But Wood batted for 3.5 hours after surviving an appeal for a bump ball to second slip from the first ball he received and Neil Fairbother, batting with a runner, made light of a calf injury to hit seven fours.