At 12:05 Surrey recorded their first win of the season when Ian Ward flicked Jason Lewry to fine leg for four. It was the home side’s fourth boundary in four balls and underlined their supremacy over newly-promoted Sussex. If Yorkshire are brushed aside in anything like the same way later this week, the fat lady could be exercising her larynx well before September.

Starting the final day on 23 without loss, the Surrey openers needed just 17 overs and two balls to polish off the visitors for whom Paul Hutchison came in for some particularly harsh treatment. When he pitched it up, the ball would be driven back past him and if he dug it in a bit more it would disappear to through backward point.

The fifty stand was reached in the tenth over and the century came up in the twentieth. Mark Butcher added another 54 runs to his personal total. If the target had been somewhat stiffer, the England left-hander was on course to become the first Surrey batsman since 1990 to add a hundred to his overnight score before lunch.

The stand-in skipper was impressed by the way Surrey bowled Sussex out twice on a wicket that had very little in it for the bowlers: “The pitch was an absolute belter and the scoring rates were incredibly high. The difference was that we had the firepower to bowl them out, even while they were going at four an over.”

He added: “The best part of the game was the way Alex Tudor and Azhar Mahmood bowled in tandem on Sunday afternoon, just when it looked as if we were going to struggle to pick up any wickets. For me, that was a session right out of Test cricket. It was a flat wicket, and the boys ran in and bowled bouncers and were aggressive.”

The only blot on the performance was the docking of a quarter point for a slow over-rate. But as Butcher remarked: “We had to fetch the ball from somewhere near Vauxhall every other over.”

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