County Championship: Derbyshire’s Lloyd makes 93 against Middlesex

In the first 10 overs of the afternoon session, there were only seven scoring shots and three of those were edges to the vacant third man boundary.

The pair faced 73 dot balls in the first hour until Lloyd relieved some of the tension by cutting and pulling Ryan Higgins for two fours.

Former Glamorgan batter Lloyd passed his previous best score for Derbyshire of 73 but had an escape when he edged Zahar Gohar just past Higgins, who should have got a hand to it.

A century looked there for the taking until he was drawn into pulling a short ball from Higgins to long leg, where Blake Cullen dived forward to take the catch.

Lloyd’s body language showed that he had thrown away a great opportunity and Came also lost patience after tea when he came down the pitch to Gohar but failed to clear deep mid-off where Stephen Eskinazi took a good catch above his head.

Middlesex took the second new ball as soon as it became available and the breakthrough they badly needed arrived when Dane Paterson beat Brooke Guest’s defensive push.

With no addition to the total, Roland-Jones got the big wicket of Madsen, who was bowled by one that moved away to shave the off-stump which brought his average for the season down below 88.