A sharpened pencil of a man in a No 9 shirt took the new ball from Southport’s Harrod Drive End immediately after Lancashire’s captain, Keaton Jennings, declared on Tuesday morning. After two days of waiting – and Monday’s play completely washed out – the spectators wrung themselves dry and sat up tall in their fold-up chairs around the boundary.
They didn’t have to wait long. Jimmy Anderson’s 19th ball of the English summer – in his first spell since the Dharamsala Test, his first spell for Lancashire since May 2023 and his first spell since he was ushered stage left by the England management in May – angled into Haseeb Hameed’s bat and bounced back on to the stumps. And that was only the beginning – in an opening spell of 10-2-19-6, he dismantled Nottinghamshire, a hush descending on the crowd each time he paused at the top of his run-up, before they exploded when he pocketed a wicket, and another, and another.
