Hollioake’s relief as Kent escape with from Northants clash with a draw

After batting first and racking up 566 for eight, Kent surprisingly found themselves on the back foot on the final afternoon after Northants powered to a record 722 for six declared, a lead of 156.

Judging by what had gone before, with 1,288 runs being scored for the loss of just 12 wickets, most expected the home side to comfortably bat out the rest of the day and ease to a draw.

But instead, Kent wilted under the leg-spin pressure exerted by Yuzvendra Chahal and Calvin Harrison, losing six wickets after tea.

They at one point slumped to 104 for seven and were staring down the barrel of a very unlikely defeat, but thanks to 49 not out from Joe Evison they eventually hung on for the draw at 160 for eight.

“The wicket started to turn more at the end and obviously without us having the opportunity to win the game we had to try and save it," said Hollioake, whose side remain rooted to the bottom of the Rothesay County Championship Division Two.

"That brought the men around the bat, but thankfully we carried on being semi-positive so at least we scored the runs and got past that total but certainly, it did make for some interesting watching.

“We did get out of jail a little, because if the game had been another couple of hours we probably would have lost, but we played some pretty good cricket for two and half days.

“We got tired and took our foot of the gas at the end of the third day and then the scoreboard pressure got to us a little bit.

"But we’re a young side and we had a couple of guys playing in their first couple of games, so they will learn a lot for that and you know I’m happy.

"We played the younger guys to try and build for the future a little bit and they certainly learned some lessons in this game, the hard way.

“The thing I said at the beginning of the day was, if we sit around and defend then we’ll get beaten, which we would have done.

"So we had to keep trying to be positive to get past that score to try and make them bat again and as you can see, once we did get past that score, albeit at eight down, the game's off. It just would have been nice to go past it three or four down.

“I was urging the guys to still be positive and if you do that you have to take a couple of rash shots in the process, but if we’d sat around defending we definitely would have lost.”