IT WAS the Gloucestershire old players’ reunion yesterday and a good time was had by all, but James Averis showed no inclination to join them at next year’s get-together. The fast-medium bowler is out of contract at the end of the season so he could not have chosen a better time to embarrass the second division champions with runs and wickets.

Averis, 32 and in his thirteenth season at the County Ground, is playing only his fourth championship match of the summer because Jon Lewis is away with England’s one-day squad. He seized his opportunity by scoring the first fifty of his career and then taking three of Surrey’s first four wickets to leave them struggling to avoid the follow-on. Surrey may have been suffering a hangover from their title celebrations the night before because they did not look like champions when Gloucestershire resumed at 385 for seven.

Alex Gidman, captain in Lewis’s absence, and Averis took their eighth-wicket partnership to 69 against some undistinguished bowling and fielding.

Averis had hit a six and nine fours in his 53 when he was caught behind off Nayan Doshi and Gidman had completed 1,000 runs for the second successive season when he was leg-before for 52 attempting a reverse sweep against Chris Schofield.

It did not take Averis long to strike again with the ball in his hand. In his second over, he got one to swing away to have Jonathan Batty caught behind, although it seemed only a minor irritant to Surrey once Mark Ramprakash had settled into a second-wicket partnership of 74 with Scott Newman.

Newman had made 44 when Averis returned to bowl him through the gate and there appeared to be no stopping Ramprakash, who had made 292 in Surrey’s innings and 297-run victory over Gloucestershire at the Brit Oval in May.

He had cruised to 75 off 135 balls with a six and seven fours and it was a shock from which Surrey never recovered when Gidman undid him with the perfect yorker. Averis tempted Alistair Brown into an injudicious pull to backward square and Steve Kirby roared in to have Stewart Walters caught behind and bowl Azhar Mahmood. Mark Butcher was left trying to hold his side together with the kind of innings that used to serve England well, but when he had made 64 he was bowled by Vikram Banerjee.