Surrey have a habit of upsetting the Glamorgan members. In the final match of 2001, at Cardiff, they compiled a massive 701 for nine over nearly two hundred overs to close the contest down. The visitors' justification on that occasion was their attack was carrying a number of niggles following a long hard season. But given we are still in June, one can only assume that was not the case here. Indeed, the Brown Caps' most prosperous bowlers this summer, Ian Salisbury and Nayan Doshi, suggested they might have been a handful had Mark Butcher set the hosts in the region of 325 in sixty overs and dangled the carrot.

Instead, the theoretical target was 387 in 40 overs, a requirement of 9.6 an over. Not surprisingly, the spectators were disgruntled to say the least. Perhaps Butcher had Surrey's only championship defeat this year - to Worcestershire - at the back of his mind. But, for a captain who, hitherto, has more often than not attacked rather than defended, it was a baffling decision if not out of character as well.

The second division leaders were booed on to the field and either side of tea appeared to make little attempt to beat bottom-placed Glamorgan. Mark Cosgrove, in his last game for the Welshmen before flying home to Australia for five weeks, smashed 80 in 48 deliveries, with James Benning conceding 44 runs from his two overs, before the contest meandered towards an inevitable conclusion.

Cosgrove and his opening partner, Ryan Watkins, were both stumped off Doshi and all concerned were spared further misery when the game was called off half an hour before the scheduled close.

Earlier, Ramprakash added 33 in as many overs to his overnight score and spent longer compiling his third fifty than he had over his hundred. Alistair Brown broke the monotony by raising the 300 with a straight six off Robert Croft, but it took the hosts until the seventeenth over of the day to record their first successes. Two leg stump yorkers in the space of three balls from Wharf then accounted for Brown and Rikki Clarke.

Benning was close to being caught by the wicketkeeper, Mark Wallace, off Croft, when a sweep bounced off short leg, but the Glamorgan skipper got his reward when he had the 23-year-old playing around his front pad after lunch.

Martin Bicknell put bat to ball hitting Croft for a six over long on. Ramprakash's vigil eventually came to an end three minutes short of six and a half hours when his defences were beaten by the persistent Wharf. Three overs later Bicknell was caught in the deep. Salisbury, cutting loose, hit Dean Cosker for two sixes in his unbeaten 26.

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