SOMERSET, already in midtable in the South Conference, slipped farther into its depths with a woeful batting performance against Essex, its ineptitude exposed to the full by Ravi Bopara’s century.

Somerset began well; Matthew Wood raced to his fifty with two fours off the pedestrian Tony Palladino. Then, with impatience a characteristic of his side, he sliced a long hop to Mark Pettini in the covers leaving Cameron White and Arul Suppiah to take the score to 141 for two. With Darren Gough having left the field with a tweaked hamstring, Essex were beginning to look short of options, until Ronnie Irani introduced his two spinners, James Middlebrook and Grant Flower. It proved to be a match-winning decision as Middlebrook picked up four for 27, his best one-day figures for the county.

White and Suppiah perished playing overly ambitious, poorly executed strokes before the rot really set in. A pair of bad running calls accounted for Keith Parsons and James Hildreth, the tail failed to wag and in the end 11 overs were left unused as eight wickets went down for 47 runs.

Andrew Caddick, like Gough, managed only three overs before he left the field. The last of them occupied ten balls and included three wides and a no-ball.

Bopara and Irani kept pace with one another as they made batting look blissfully simple. Irani fell trying to bring up his half-century with a heave over mid-wicket but Bopara stayed to speed the match to a conclusion. His hundred, brought up with a sequence of 4, 6, 4, included a second fifty off only 28 balls.