EVEN in the crazy world of football, it is not often that a coach is given one match to save his side from relegation but that is virtually what happened to Alan Butcher yesterday. Surrey appointed their former opening batsman to succeed Steve Rixon “with immediate effect” just before they took on Middlesex in a match that they had to win and claim more bonus points than their London rivals to stay in the first division.

As Butcher’s son, Mark, the Surrey captain, could have told him, it was an impossible task. All the shortcomings that will send Rixon back to Australia next week shaking his head in despair at the state of county cricket were there to see as Middlesex plundered 404 for five, whereupon they declared, as they were perfectly entitled to do, to make it even harder for Surrey to overtake them.

Middlesex had taken the maximum five batting bonus points, restricted Surrey to only one bowling point and effectively challenged them to score 400 without losing more than two wickets inside 130 overs and go on to win the game to avoid the ignominy of dropping into the second flight for the first time since the championship was split into two divisions.

Their prospects of doing that soon became even bleaker. Mark Butcher, playing in only his fourth championship match since recovering from the wrist injury that cost him his England place, was run out at the bowler’s end by Jamie Dalrymple’s direct hit from backward point as he scampered for a single after a fumble in the gully. Then Rikki Clarke was leg-before playing across the line against Scott Styris and, by the close, they were almost resigned to their fate at 59 for two.

What persuaded Surrey to put the family firm of Butcher and son in charge yesterday instead of waiting until Rixon goes at the end of his two-year contract, was hard to fathom. Rixon was still there anyway “in a coaching capacity” and Alan Butcher, who has been coaching the second X1 since 1998, could not have had much more to offer. Whatever it was, his appointment “with immediate effect” did not have any immediate effect on the players. With Martin Bicknell and Jimmy Ormond out through injury, as they have been so often this season, the opening attack of Mohammad Akram and Azhar Mahmood was so wayward that Ed Smith had struck 36 off 34 balls, with six fours, by the time he sliced Akram to gully.

The support bowling was no better as Owais Shah joined Ben Hutton in a second-wicket partnership of 132 in 28 overs. Shah showed why he is so unlucky to have been overlooked by England this winter in making 58 before he was snapped up at short leg off Saqlain Mushtaq and Hutton played with rare belligerence, hitting three sixes and ten fours in his 79, until he was stumped slogging recklessly at Saqlain.

It looked like a sacking offence by the captain, who has just been reappointed for next season, when Dalrymple was caught at second slip off Akram for a duck but, in the event, it hardly mattered. Ed Joyce batted beautifully for his 90 — the sixteenth time he has passed fifty this season and the thirteenth time he has failed to convert it into a hundred — while Styris bludgeoned an unbeaten 100 in a fifth- wicket stand of 174 in 37 overs.

In the circumstances, it was just as well that Alan Butcher has been given a two-year contract. “This has been a difficult season,” Micky Stewart, the chairman of cricket, said with some understatement. “A strong, knowledgeable man who is dedicated to cricket in Surrey will be in charge during what will inevitably be a period of transition.”