Shropshire ‘outplayed’ by Oxford

The county, set a formidable victory target of 405 at Banbury, were dismissed for 131 in their second innings, with former Worcestershire all-rounder Gareth Andrew inflicting much of the damage by claiming five wickets

Jones said: “We’re obviously very disappointed as we went into the game reasonably confident after our performance against Dorset at Shrewsbury.

“But I guess we were outplayed – out bowled, out batted and out fielded – over the three days, so it was a bad day at the office on all three days.

“That puts a bit of a dent in our challenge, but some other results did go our way and teams in the division are all beating each other, so that may help us.”

Jones highlighted the skills of the experienced Andrew as he claimed nine wickets in the match while his fellow seamer Russell White also impressed with the ball for Oxfordshire.

He said: “Their seamers bowled well on a pitch that helped seam and the stand out man was Gareth Andrew. He was probing, showed tremendous skill and put our batsmen under pressure for spells of eight, 10 overs.

“I would suggest it was a high skilled performance from him that put us on the backfoot.

“They fully deserved to win the game. They outplayed us and had a few top individual performers on a seaming wicket. From a learning process for our young bowlers, they were able to look at Gareth Andrew and see how he went about his business and think that’s how to bowl on that particular type of wicket.”