Another day of the Pura Cup match between Tasmania and Victoria, another bizarre turn of events here at the Bellerive Oval in Hobart.

It was novel enough that Tasmania secured its first outright win - by six wickets and with fifteen deliveries to spare - in more than a year and successfully pursued a fourth innings total in excess of 200 for the first time in more than three years. But drama and tension pervaded matters as well, the Victorians leaving the ground with their heads still spinning about a pair of incidents which they felt cost them their own chance to win.

In the end, it was another day to savour for star Tasmanian opener Jamie Cox (139*). On a tense afternoon, his coolness under pressure was the difference between the teams and the rock around which the possibility of any kind of batting collapse from the home team was averted. After a slow start to the day - the Tasmanians conceded as many as forty-four runs to the last wicket pairing of Paul Reiffel (70) and Mathew Inness (3*) and then lost opener Dene Hills (2) early in the run chase - Cox joined with Michael DiVenuto (60), Daniel Marsh (35) and Shaun Young (29*) to see his team home.

The innings also brought Cox the reward of 1000 first-class runs for the summer, a fact which surely can't be lost on the Australian selectors as they weigh up the contenders for Ashes spots this winter.

Having failed to score less than 860 runs in each of his last five Australian first-class seasons in a team which has often been struggling - and having added into the mix two fine seasons as captain of English county side Somerset - there is surely simply no more that the Tasmanian skipper can do to prove he is ready for a tour with the national team.

"It's quite a special one," said Cox of the 1000 run milestone.

"It's my goal every year and it's nice to get there again."

Of the victory itself, Cox said that the team could take several positives away from it.

"It's too little too late but it's still nice to get wins at this time of year. Hopefully, we can crawl our way up the table a bit now."

"The most satisfying thing is that we've finally remembered how to win again. It's been a testing year. We played some horrible cricket in the middle of it - good at the start, horrible in the middle - and hopefully we can finish off with a bang and salvage something."

But, where Cox and Tasmania walked away rightfully satisfied with the result, their opponents walked away probably as nonplussed as at any time during a spell of unsatisfying first-class results in Tasmania that extends all the way back to 1981.

In the wake of the Tasmanians' heady display, the Victorians were left to rue the impact of what they had felt to be two highly dubious umpiring decisions. Both incidents provoked rancour from the visitors on the field and threatened to spill over into ugly scenes. Aware that they might have represented the difference between defeat and a four point lead at the head of the competition standings, the Bushrangers were seething by late afternoon.

The denial, by Umpire Gus Jones, of a caught and bowled chance against Marsh, as Brad Hodge (1/39) ran and tumbled athletically to his right, raised the considerable ire of the Victorians. Marsh's score was on 20 and the total at 3/176 (as the locals chased a target of 286 off a minimum eighty-three overs to win) as he pushed forward to a Hodge off break and ballooned the ball - exclusively off pad in Jones' estimation - back toward the bowler.

Tempers then verged close to boiling point when Umpire John Smeaton ruled invalid a beseeching leg side stumping appeal to him from wicketkeeper Darren Berry on the grounds that the Victorian gloveman had taken the ball in front of the stumps. The visitors weren't only livid with that decision though: they believed that the delivery from Matthew Mott (0/38) had been edged by Cox (on 114 at the time) on its way into Berry's gloves in the first place and later claimed that their appeal was for caught behind.

Captain Reiffel and several of his players appeared to be spoken to by both umpires on a number of occasions throughout the remainder of the afternoon. Given that Michael Lewis had also squandered a half-chance to run Cox out early in his innings and that Michael Klinger and Matthew Elliott had missed catches with his score at 91 and 117 respectively, the Victorian skipper confirmed that his team's sense of frustration hadn't diminished by the end of the day.

"Confusion, I think, is the word," commented Reiffel. "I'm not allowed to comment on umpires but we certainly were confused."

"The umpire at square leg said that the 'keeper took it in front of the stumps. But if he (Cox) had hit it, then it doesn't matter," he said of the judgement that his opposite number had neither been stumped nor caught by Berry.

"The umpire (at the bowler's end) said he couldn't give it out because it was a no-ball and so I said 'Hang on, how does that work?'", he added.

Just to complicate matters, Reiffel said that Umpire Jones had indicated that he thought the ball had been edged. Cox, for his part, strenuously denied that he had hit the delivery.

Had the ball been edged, then Smeaton's decision about the placement of Berry's gloves would have been irrelevant.

"I thought the umpires might have (wanted to) discuss it. I've let them know my opinion on it."

In the end, it was a remarkable day's cricket but one that took us no closer to establishing which two teams will play in the Final of this competition nor in which city.

Tasmania's win, while heartily welcome in a state starved of first-class successes over recent years, has little impact on the complexion of the Pura Cup standings. The Tigers remain last on the table. The second-placed Victorians, meanwhile, continue to be separated from ladder leader Queensland by quotient and remain ahead of third-placed New South Wales by six points with two rounds of matches still to be played.

© 2001 CricInfo Ltd