Kent Spitfires 238 for eight lost by seven wickets to Durham 239 for three

You can debate the merits of Beckenham as an outground venue (and the fanbase will until every last member with memories of The Mote and Tunbridge Wells is gone) but in terms of home advantage it’s offered Kent almost nothing for the past few seasons.

Aside from a portable shithouse of a victory over Hampshire last year, there’s been a seemingly endless parade of emphatic defeats at The New County Ground. After yesterday’s game Emilio Gay lavished praise on the venue, saying how lucky Kent were to have a wicket that would grace many counties’ first-choice grounds.

But as he’d just carried his bat, made a century and seen Durham to a seven-wicket win with 10 overs to spare, “he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

You could draw up a bingo card of the things that could go wrong at Beckenham, and yesterday most of them did. The result was obviously the main thing, but it doesn’t help that since 2022 it’s only been used for Metro Bank fixtures, which take place exclusively in August.

As our Augusts are now “glorious,” which is a euphemism for “moronically hot,” this means that Beckenham bastes and the thousands of seats in the permanent stand remain empty, because people (myself very much included) who can’t deal with 30-degree heat need to find whatever shade there is going.

This isn’t a new problem. Beckenham tends to be either oppressively hot or extremely cold, but when it’s the latter it’s usually for England youth games or Surrey’s Women’s fixtures early or late in the season when there are only 150 people there, all of whom can shelter easily enough in the pavilion.

When a couple of thousand are in, as seemed to be the case yesterday, the only options are to head for the trees, which are a long way from the boundary on the western side of the ground, although the upside is you can at least see the scoreboard.

It would have been easier to deal with if the performance had offered some hope, but unlike Thursday’s game at Arundel, which Kent really should have won, there was no point in Sunday’s match when they were ahead of the game.

Losing three early wickets forced Compton and Finch to drop anchor for a while, but they may have been guilty of over-caution. Ekansh gave the innings a bit of a boost when he came in, but Jack Leaning, who at least had a morale boosting score down the order, saw the dilemma.

“It’s tough, it’s a balance,” he said. “If one of them (Compton or Finch) plays a big shot and gets out, everyone says ‘why didn’t you take it a little bit deeper?’ But I think that’s the nature of one-day cricket. I think they both, on another day, seeing how easily they chased the score in the end, they maybe thought it was a bit of a lower-scoring wicket, but actually we probably needed to go a little bit harder to try and get up to 270, 280 and almost risk getting bowled out for 160, 170 in the process.”

Gay said they were always confident of chasing and would have bowled first if they’d won the toss because they felt the only time the pitch would do anything was early on. (His captain, on the wrong side of Durham’s biblical win here in 2021, may have provided some insider knowledge here.)

They were right. If Cohen had been able to repeat his spectacular entrance at Arundel it might have been interesting, but he struggled with his line, bowling 10 wides. Ollie Robinson chopped on to Klaassen for 26, but Gay and Rhodes batted for almost 20 overs before the latter went to Parkinson. The spinner then got Bedingham lbw for eight but when Ekansh dropped Ackermann, who was on three at the time, he appeared to let out a howl of anger and he wasn’t the only one. It was a bad day all round, compounded by all the usual outground frustrations, including an ambulance apparently running over a cable and the livestream getting cut as a result.

It got so bad that one of our less forgiving commentators suggested the admin was “having a wank” when Parkinson took a wicket. As someone lucky enough to be sat in the press tent at the Beckenham End, I can at least confirm this is emphatically false.