Leicestershire belatedly call on Ben Mike, but only after Middlesex assert their dominance

Lord's (second day of four): Leicestershire 149, 37-3 & Middlesex 370 - Leicestershire trail by 184 runs with seven second-innings wickets remaining

Scorecard

All afternoon, Leicestershire looked around for someone to force the game open, and belatedly they found the answer hiding in plain sight.

It took 97 overs for Ben Mike to be introduced to the attack, and then he took wickets with his third, thirteenth and nineteenth balls. It was all rather curious; if nothing else, one of the more hostile seventh-bowler spells you're likely to witness. By the end, he had figures of 4 for 15 in seven overs; this is by no means a quick pitch, but it has certainly supported those able to crank it up.

For this day and the next two, Lord's has access to a speed gun as part of the ECB's talent identification efforts, and it didn't take Middlesex's on-stream graphics to determine that Mike was noticeably sharper than anything else that the visitors had previously been able to dish up.

Mike is one of the circuit's more interesting characters; he only joined the county ahead of his final school year, having been on the pathway at Nottinghamshire – where his father, Greg, played in the 1990s – but had his development stunted by a double stress fracture that ruled him out of two consecutive summers.

Once he'd been put back together, Keith Piper – the former Warwickshire wicketkeeper who was working with Leicestershire's youth setup at the time – arranged for what has followed since. No question, Mike is raw – he admitted afterwards that his challenge is to produce spells like this on a more regular basis that threaten without leaking runs – but he picked up nine wickets on his County Championship debut and was the most dangerous bowler when these two teams met last year on a flat Merchant Taylors' surface.

Which is why it seemed so strange for him to be kept from the attack until, frankly, it was too late. In the face of a game drifting away from them, they ought to have gambled on him sooner – and this isn't simply a case of calling the shots after the event.

^{Leicestershire toiled manfully in their efforts to dismiss Middlesex (Clive Rose/Getty Images)}

Paul Nixon had suggested at the close on the first evening that he was intrigued by how Mike would fare in conditions like this – so there didn't appear to be an injury – with the light murky throughout and Robbie White struck twice on the helmet on Thursday by Beuran Hendricks. Mike would catch Shaheen Shah Afridi with a glancing blow when his chance finally came.

He'd already had Toby Roland-Jones caught on the hook, a mode of dismissal rarely seen on this ground in recent years, where pitching the ball up and enticing the drive has been the preferred modus operandi. Mike managed that as well, forcing Ethan Bamber and John Simpson to edge to slip. Luke Hollman was beaten for pace by a yorker that arced away from him and smashed the base of his off-stump.

Three modes of wicket, then: a decent gauge that he is on the right lines.

This wasn't extreme pace, but he was clocked at 85mph – a figure that elicited a smile when put to him at the close – and bowled unchanged either side of tea in a manner that made it difficult to understand why it had taken so long. Ed Barnes and Chris Wright plugged away manfully, with the overseas duo of Hendricks and Wiaan Mulder unable to make such of an impact, while Callum Parkinson was excellent in holding up an end.

Only, by then Middlesex had fully capitalised on their previous day's bowling performance, strolling into a sizeable lead that reaffirmed quite how well they had done on Thursday. Back then, Tom Helm had joked of how much easier life is with Shaheen Shah Afridi knocking over the opposition's top three, and when the home side came to bowl again, Afridi needed little time to send back Hassan Azad and Colin Ackermann for the second time in the game.

For Ackermann, that completed a pair in what has been a good week for landmark ducks in the County Championship, with Kent's Nathan Gilchrist clinching his Olympic rings (five ducks in a row) just as Hampshire's Kyle Abbott brought up his Audi (four in a row).

^{Shaheen Shah Afridi picked up two wickets before the close (Clive Rose/Getty Images)}

It all meant that Middlesex ended the day as they started it: well in charge, set up for two three-day wins in a row unless Leicestershire's batting – suffering for its lack of a gun overseas in the middle order – can launch a belated resistance.

Mark Stoneman had earlier put the finishing touches to his first Middlesex hundred on home soil, while Simpson and Hollman put together a 112-run stand that knocked the stuffing out of Paul Nixon's charges after a careless passage of play had seen the back of Peter Handscomb, Max Holden and Stoneman.

The sun is set to shine tomorrow, which might make batting slightly more palatable than it did on Friday evening until bad light curtailed proceedings, but Middlesex will consider a weekend summer's day the perfect backdrop to end an excellent all-round display.

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