• Lancashire 124; Sussex 137-3
• Michael Yardy shows the way after champions are skittled
For three quarters of a century Lancashire were weighed down by the same question every April: would this finally be their year?
Having answered it emphatically with a first outright County Championship title since 1934 last September, the questions are of a different ilk this time around as the hunters become the hunted. However, as Lancashire returned to Fortress Aigburth to great fanfare they discovered Sussex's rangy fast bowlers in the mood to pour hot tar down its walls. The opening day of their title defence hardly offered a defence at all.
They won four and lost only one of their six Championship contests at their adopted base last season, while Old Trafford was undergoing its redevelopment, and although the Liverpool welcome "home" included the county flag being raised above the city hall before play, the on-field one from James Anyon, with his second five-wicket haul inside a week, and the Australian debutant Steve Magoffin was inhospitable.
A dozen wickets fell before tea but this was a day when disciplined seam-bowling was richly rewarded, and Lancashire's flaky top order -– amazingly none of their batsmen averaged as many as 35 in their title campaign – flunked against the pronounced movement. The first-innings ambush was a role reversal of the corresponding fixture 12 months ago – also Lancashire's first game of the season – but, as then, the surface was rightly absolved of blame.
"I can't see anything wrong with the pitch. Both sides have bowled extremely well on it," was the pitch liaison officer Peter Walker's assessment, made seconds before Murray Goodwin's defensive jump onto the back foot ricocheted a delivery from Sajid Mahmood on to the stumps, leaving Sussex 15 for three, and took the wicket tally to 13 inside 65 overs.
The 13th invited a man able to put a crisis into perspective at the crease. Sussex captain Michael Yardy, whose battle with depression has been chronicled with great honesty in the 2012 Wisden Almanack published on Thursday, ensured it was the final one as he struck the balance between attack and defence. Yardy found a willing ally in Ed Joyce, their unbroken fourth-wicket partnership of 122, which took the visitors into the lead by the close, built on a tried-and-tested formula of watching good balls all the way on to the bat and bad ones all the way off it and to the boundary.
It was one only put into practice by Steven Croft among the home batsmen. Croft struck four fours and a six in his half-century, which was terminated when he chased a wide one from Amjad Khan. When Kyle Hogg holed out to deep square-leg moments later to complete Anyon's five-for, and the innings, it extended the trend of wickets falling in clumps.
Lancashire lost three for four during the new-ball spells of Anyon and Magoffin, the 6ft 5ins Queenslander who won the Sheffield Shield with his home state last month, two more went down on 67, while any chance of a tail wag was checked by a slip from 108 for six to 109 for eight. "We were in this position quite a few times last year with our backs against the wall a little bit but we generally come out and play well in these kind of situations," insisted Croft.
Elsewhere in Division One, ball also dominated bat. The England fast bowler Graham Onions took four for 42 as Durham dismantled Nottinghamshire for 161 at Chester-le-Street while Dawid Malan led a Middlesex recovery to 225 for nine with a restrained unbeaten 62 after they had been reduced to 129 for seven by a Jade Dernbach-inspired Surrey at Lord's. Warwickshire, the 2011 runners-up, resume 36 runs behind Somerset with seven first-innings wickets intact at Edgbaston.