Everything turns on Brown's dominance

From first to last, this Warwickshire-Northamptonshire County Championship battle was a match of oddities. It was contested on a pitch far drier than is customary at Edgbaston; it was played in the presence of a boundary shorter than usual on the ground's Pershore Road side; it featured a dominant performance from not one, but two, Warwickshire spinners; and, most of all, it contained the sight of Northamptonshire sustaining, and actually converting, an advantage over an opponent in a season of more downs than ups.

Ostensibly, it was the bowling of off spinner Jason Brown (whose 6/90 gave him match figures of 11/178) which won this third day for Northamptonshire and, with it, the game by a margin of 54 runs. There was nothing particularly glamorous or demonstrative about his display but the gentle subtleties of his flight, length and turn proved perfect for the situation as Warwickshire found itself on the wrong side of a battle to chase down a target of 259.

Brown was introduced into the attack early in the afternoon - with Warwickshire already off to a shaky start at 30/2 - and promptly proceeded to extinguish any vague semblance of life from his opponents' cause by taking three wickets in the space of his opening ten deliveries. The twenty-five year old lured David Hemp (3) into adopting the erroneous idea of meekly lobbing the ball back in his direction; extracted an outside edge from Trevor Penney (2); and then comprehensively beat an attempt at a sweep from Dougie Brown (8). Later, he returned to skid an arm ball underneath the defences of Ashley Giles (2) and to remove Warwickshire's two most productive contributors - Neil Smith (67) and Nick Knight (43) - by way of lbw decisions.

For all of Brown's brilliance, though, a similarly fruitful contribution from Giles (5/78) had earlier tilted the scales significantly back in Warwickshire's direction. The left arm spinner produced an eleven wicket match haul of his own in the process of helping to dismiss Northants for 176 before lunch. Having snared seventeen of the twenty Northamptonshire wickets to fall in the game in combination with off spinner Smith (5/66), Giles must have had every right by the end of the match to feel a touch aggrieved at the result.

In the final analysis, the turning pitch - curtailing as it did the opportunity for any batsman other than Matthew Hayden (72) to play with genuine comfort in either the third or fourth innings - was probably the biggest winner of all in this match. But by no means far behind it were any of Brown, Giles or Smith, whose ability - literal and metaphorical - to spin the advantage one way and then (ultimately irrevocably) back the other through much of the contest always made for engrossing viewing.