St Annes gained a satisfactory winning draw at Lancaster on Saturday to keep up their good start to the season. St Annes won the toss and elected to bat first on a difficult wicket and lost both opening batsmen cheaply. As happened the week before this brought Stephen Twist (45) and Atiq Uz-Zaman (66) together and they again forged the main partnership of the match. A late flurry of runs from the lower middle order saw St Annes post a very respectable 182 off their 50 over allocation.

The Lancaster reply started slowly and as they began to try and attack the St Annes bowling wickets fell at regular intervals. As the required run rate steadily increased a draw looked the most likely result and so it proved as the home side finished 21 runs short. St Annes bowled with discipline and patience, Twist taking 3 for 33 off 17 overs, professional Mansoor Ahmed 3 for 71 of 19 overs and teenager Greg Whitehead bowling a very economical 6 overs for only 9 runs. St Annes have no game next Saturday but travel to Blackpool on Monday.