SURREY completed their late-season charge by beating Sussex by 37 runs at Hove yesterday to claim third place in the final championship table. With a fairer wind, and without a debilitating number of injuries, Surrey would have pushed Warwickshire harder for the title.

Five wins is as many as Warwickshire managed, after all, and in Nayan Doshi they have made one of the discoveries of the summer. The slow left-armer took a career-best seven-wicket haul yesterday, giving him 33 from his first nine matches.

Jason Lewry’s three wickets in four balls, after Alistair Brown’s fourth hundred of the season, set up an entertaining Sussex chase that ended with 44 balls left. At 242 for four it looked as if Murray Goodwin — now out of contract and in demand as a possible Kolpak signing — was leading Sussex into third spot themselves. Matthew Prior, however, mis-hit to mid-off and Goodwin was yorked in the next over.

Not since 1972 had Warwickshire gone through a season unbeaten. An inevitable draw at Wantage Road after the washout on Friday enabled the champions to become the only side in either division this summer not to lose a match in the championship.

It will hardly matter to Warwickshire that they drew eight of their final nine matches, nor that their attack returned only four five-wicket hauls in an innings over the season. The last of those was completed yesterday by Dougie Brown, who, for the first time in his career, scored a hundred and took five wickets, all in the same match.

Brown’s second-innings duck left him 43 runs short of 1,000 first-class runs this summer. As the match meandered to a tame finish, Andrew White, the young Irish off spinner, claimed his first two championship wickets.

Amid the gloom of Lancashire’s relegation, Gary Keedy provided a ray of light by taking 14 for 227. Keedy, the left-arm spinner, exploited helpful conditions to take seven for 132, adding to his seven first-innings wickets to complete career-best match figures. He also became the first English spin bowler to take 14 wickets in a match since 1993, when Martyn Ball took 14 for 169 for Gloucestershire against Somerset.

As the teams went through the motions after losing Saturday’s play to rain, Chris Taylor, the Gloucestershire captain, celebrated his side’s escape from relegation by hitting his fourth century of the season.