EMERGING after lunch with Worcestershire two wickets down and still needing four to make Surrey bat again, Phil Jaques and Ben Smith must have been pleasurably surprised to see Rikki Clarke resume proceedings with an over of his rarely seen off-spin on Saturday.

The reason it is rarely seen is, of course, because it is not very good. At the other end, Neil Saker ran in for a spell of entirely unthreatening seamers, from one over of which Smith helped himself to 17 runs.

The two bowlers who had looked like taking wickets before the break, Harbhajan Singh and Matt Nicholson, grazed the outfield impassively.

The obvious conclusion was that Surrey captain Mark Butcher needed to rest his main men, particularly Harbhajan who had bowled unchanged throughout the morning and for much of the previous day as well, but it was still hard to understand the thinking. If Surrey were to force victory, they needed to strike quickly after the break, and in a match his team were not going to lose, it must have been worth the risk.

By the time Harbhajan and Nicholson were back in tandem, 14 overs had passed, 63 runs added, the batsmen were again well set and the game was moving towards a draw.

At lunch Harbhajan’s figures were 2 for 33 from 17 overs, a reasonably accurate reflection on bowling which, on a pitch offering him marked bounce and turn, was actually less dangerous than it might have been. In part this was down to Jaques, a left-hander, deliberately taking more than his fair share of the strike, negating any point in Harbhajan pitching the ball in the rough left by the follow-through of Worcestershire left-arm seamer Doug Bollinger.

His ability to read Harbhajan’s arm ball also meant he could also leave many of the deliveries pitching on the stumps and turning away past off.

When the right-handed Stephen Moore was on strike however, he played Harbhajan almost as well as Jaques. As he had been on Friday evening when he had hit the spinner for two sixes, the South African was the more aggressive of the pair, but having gone past 50 with a thumping drive through extra cover off Nicholson, Moore danced down the wicket and clipped Harbhajan straight to deepish mid-on where Richard Clinton took a good low catch.

That brought in Vikram Solanki, scorer of 232 when these sides met at New Road at the beginning of June. It might therefore have been an expensive miss when shortly after coming in he was dropped by Mark Ramprakash at midwicket off Saker, and nor were Surrey best pleased when a concerted appeal for a caught-behind off Harbhajan was turned down soon afterwards.

But three balls later Solanki edged the same bowler to slip where Clarke juggled a sharp chance twice before holding on.

Another wicket at that stage might have made all the difference, but Jaques, who has not racked up his usual weight of runs for Worcestershire this summer, was in no mood to be shifted.

Nor was Smith, though he needed a moment of fortune when he top-edged a sweep off Chris Schofield which fell into space rather than the hands of a fielder. It was appropriate that Jaques should go to his half-century with a careful single off the bowling of Schofield.

Having cantered to his 50 courtesy of Saker, Smith appeared less than impressed to be given out to a bat/pad appeal off Harbhajan, but there were no doubts about Graeme Hick’s dismissal, edging a simple catch to slip off the same bowler.

Jaques went to his century shortly after tea, off 219 deliveries, but was given out two balls later as Harbhajan, wheeling away from the Railway End, finally defeated his defensive push.

When the Sikh walked off exhausted soon afterwards, with figures of 5-64 off 34 overs, he took Surrey’s remaining hopes of victory with him.(369)