04 May,2026
2 hours ago
Liam Patterson-White took five wickets in a first-class innings for the seventh time in the Rothesay County Championship, Division One, at Uptonsteel Grace Road, Leicester (day four).
Nottinghamshire 490: Slater 178, Clarke 97; Green 7-112 & 77-0: Slater 52* Leicestershire 308 & 254: Tattersall 61, R Patel 53; Patterson-White 5-53.
Nottinghamshire (23 pts) beat Leicestershire (4 pts) by xx wickets. Nottinghamshire completed their second victory of the County Championship season, defeating neighbours Leicestershire by 10 wickets with two sessions to spare at Grace Road.
Left-arm spinner Liam Patterson-White took centre stage, picking up the last five Leicestershire wickets for figures of 5-53 after bowling 36 overs unchanged. It left Nottinghamshire, the defending Division One champions, with a target of just 73 to wrap up a 23-point victory. Ben Slater completed the task by hammering left-arm quick Josh Hull over cover for six to finish on 52 not out, with skipper Haseeb Hameed unbeaten on 22.
Slater was dropped behind the stumps on 15 off Ian Holland, the Leicestershire captain, in the only fleeting moment of encouragement for the home side. Umpires Richard Illingworth and Surendiran Shanmugam allowed the teams to stay on the field beyond the scheduled lunch interval to complete the job at 13:17 BST.
Leicestershire, 215-7 overnight, having at least done enough to make Nottinghamshire bat a second time, lost their eighth wicket to the fourth ball of the morning as Tom Scriven popped up a simple catch to short leg off Patterson-White.
Ajaz Patel, after his career-best 62 in the first innings, looked in the mood to continue where he had left off. He was lucky to get away with an inside edge for four off Lyndon James but picked up back-to-back boundaries off Patterson-White with a couple of authentic shots. Yet the response from the Nottinghamshire spinner was too good, Patel having no answer to a ball that turned sharply from the rough outside off stump to bowl him in the next over.
Hull, whose manful support for Stevie Eskinazi in the first innings had allowed his partner to secure an extra batting point, gamely stuck around again as Ben Green secured such gains as he could before a thick outside edge saw him caught at backward point as Patterson-White claimed his fifth.
Patterson-White made a 26-wicket contribution to Nottinghamshire's title-winning season and already has 15 to his name in the first four matches of the current campaign.
Nottinghamshire may face a somewhat stiffer task in the next round when Surrey visit Trent Bridge hoping to avenge the defeat suffered in what was effectively the title-decider at the Oval last September.
Leicestershire, meanwhile, will be in Hove to take on Sussex, to whom they have already lost this season.
Report by ECB Reporters' Network, supported by Rothesay.
Nottinghamshire's Liam Patterson-White: "I've worked really hard over the winter to try and get my bowling to be even better and do a better job for the team. I try not to go searching for wickets. I try to keep it really, really simple, to control the run rate. First and foremost, that's my main role. If I can go at less than threes and give the seamers a little bit of a break and let them rotate at one end, then I feel like I've done my role really well. If I get a wicket or two here and there, then it's just a bonus."
"It's been a good few days for the team. We are always striving to do better but in terms of a complete performance that was probably as close as you can get, really. There were loads of the lads that bowled really well, batted really well and as for Olly Stone, I said to him the other day after he got his five, it's probably the best spell of fast bowling that I've seen on a cricket pitch. It was phenomenal."
Leicestershire captain Ian Holland: "We got behind in the game against a really good team, and it's fair to say we weren't at our best for the four days and they were. We don't want to look into it too much and start analysing things too deeply - we've simply not been at our best and we've come up against a really good cricket team and lost. In the last few games, we have found ourselves behind and then fighting to get back into it. We need to be starting better in games so we are not making it so hard for ourselves. But we have a lot of players who are in good form. Ben Green in this game just kept running in all day as he does and he got his rewards with a career-best. We saw Ajaz's quality and another hundred from Stephen Eskinazi, I think his third in just seven games for us."
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