Nottinghamshire’s Jake Ball was delighted to start the new County Championship season with figures of five for 43.
“Obviously it’s really nice for me to get the five-fer,” he said. “It was the dream scenario for me really because I’ve had quite a frustrating winter, so it was nice to come out straight away and get five wickets. I’m really pleased.”
At the start of the day himself and Luke Fletcher kept things tight only conceding 26 runs in the first hour of play, and Ball believes the pair work well when bowling in tandem.
“Myself and Fletch have always bowled well together,” he stated. “I think we complement each other, we both like to keep it as tight as we can and that showed in that first hour; if the game isn’t getting away from you, you’re always in the contest and that proved to be the case today.”
The England pace bowler cleaned up Lancashire’s tail by securing the final four wickets of the innings. But Ball admitted that the fruitful spell might not have been his best.
“It was probably the worst I’ve bowled through the day. You always talk about it being a funny old game and it showed there. Perhaps I was getting a reward for how I’d bowled earlier because I started getting wickets at deep square and at square leg, that sort of thing. But I’ll take it, in fact I’d have bitten your hand off to start like that.”
On Notts then losing six wickets themselves he added, “It’s a funny wicket, not a tremendous amount of pace in it but if you bowl wicket to wicket there’s a little bit of up and down in it and some seam movement. If you get in, as Vilas showed, then you can score pretty freely. Hopefully we can get a couple of partnerships going in the morning.
“Mooresy (Peter Moores) has said to me that I’ve never had a fifty and a five-fer in the same game, so that would be a proper way to start the season.”
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