Alistair Brown and Nadeem Shahid - both of whom ended the opening day of the new season on 132 - paid a fitting tribute to Ben Hollioake by putting on an unbeaten 232 for Surrey’s fifth wicket as the home side amassed 461 for four after winning the toss.

In the process the pair set a new club record against Sussex, beating Alec Stewart and Ian Greig’s 181 in 1989.

After being dropped on 20, Surrey’s Beneficiary brought up his fifty and hundred with the only sixes of the day. It was his first century against Sussex and now Lancashire are the only county (other than Surrey, of course), against whom ‘The Lord’ has failed to profit to the tune of three figures.

Nadeem Shahid’s first championship hundred since June 1998 came up in 109 balls - one delivery less than his partner. Perhaps, now, he has done enough to find a bat sponsor!

But the euphoria at the close was in marked contrast to the way the day began. At 10:53 both sets of players, the entire Surrey staff, a host of cricketing VIPs and a significantly larger than average crowd it should be added, observed two minutes silence in memory of Ben Hollioake and Umer Rashid.

At stumps Shahid said: “Every time I faced a ball Ben was at the forefront of my mind. Not just Ben, Adam and his family as well. That’s what me and Browney kept talking about every ball. They’re watching the Internet - they’ll be watching every ball. It was one of the most emotional hundreds I’ve ever scored. I don’t think I’ll score another as emotional. Ben was a very good friend of mine. Adam is one of my closest mates too.”

James Kirtley, easily the pick of the Sussex attack, stuck to his task manfully in the face of the onslaught. Consistently quick, the 26-year-old bowled from close to the stumps and angled the ball into the left-handers as well as away from the main protagonists. But, like them, he too ended up with more than a hundred runs against his name.

He did capture the early wickets of Ian Ward and Mark Butcher, though. The former was trapped leg before in the eighth over - guilty, not for the first time, of only playing half back. Butcher, who reeled off sweetly driven boundaries either side of Ward’s dismissal, played on two overs later. The England number three’s mistake was not being deliberate enough in choosing to leave.

Jason Lewry, who looked all of his thirty-one years and then some, lacked pace, which Alec Stewart soon latched on to. In his final spell, just before tea, the left-armer was fortunate not to have been called for more than one wide, when he adopted a strategy of directing the ball at anything other than the stumps.

All four wickets fell to bowling from the Vauxhall End. But Paul Hutchison, making his debut for Sussex, was the only other bowler to extort reward from a good pitch. After Alec Stewart and Mark Ramprakash had added 143 in 40 overs, the former Yorkshireman invited the former Middlesex man to follow an in-swinging delivery. Matthew Prior gobbled up the leg-side chance. Not so four overs later, however, when he dropped his replacement in front of first slip off the same bowler.

Stewart and Brown made 53 in eight overs. Alistair Brown’s contribution was 41 in 33 deliveries, but it was ‘The Gaffer’ who pulled Hutchison for four to post the half-century partnership. Next ball, calamity. Alec Stewart fell one short of what would have been his sixth hundred against Sussex when he followed one that was angled across him.

That brought in Nadeem Shahid, who upstaged Brown by cutting and pulling his way to a 46-ball fifty. But the manner in which the 32-year-old cover drove Mark Davis in the 83rd over was as sumptuous as anything Mark Ramprakash had managed just before lunch.

Shahid needs eight more to record a career best and believes he will be given as long as he wants to progress even further. “We’ll aim to get as many as we can and try and bowl them out twice. We should get 700, hopefully, as we bat all the way down to number eleven,” he said. At the suggestion that he could be on course for a double-century Shahid added: “That’s a nice thought.”

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