Lancashire coach admits they face a relegation fight

Yorkshire wrapped up a 118-run victory on day three at Emirates Old Trafford on Tuesday to leave the Red Rose sixth in the Specsavers County Championship division one table.

They have five games left in their division one season and are one point ahead of Hampshire, who have played one game fewer.

“Of course (we are),” Chapple told Lancashire’s website when asked about being in a relegation fight.

“It would be crazy not to understand that. We knew from the start of the season that division one has got strong teams throughout.

“Results haven’t gone our way. We can identify areas where we’ve played well and where we’ve played poorly.

“The challenge is to win games to get us to a place of safety and see how far we can climb up the table.

“We’re not scoring runs consistently. That’s our challenge moving forward.

“We have to retain belief that we are playing strong enough cricket to bowl most teams out.

“We need to be able to build partnerships together and put the scores together.

“We have had two collapses that are difficult to explain.

“When you talk about overall runs we are not far off other teams but particular sessions have cost us badly.”

Chapple was also left to rue umpiring decisions at key times which he felt went against Lancashire – not to mention an injury to skipper Liam Livingstone.

Nevertheless, he admitted that Lancashire paid the price for not being able to polish off the Yorkshire tail.

“Both teams were in similar positions in their first innings, but I think Yorkshire ended up getting too many from our perspective,” he said.

“Their tail put on 70-odd which was a good effort and we weren’t able to do that. So we conceded a big first innings lead.

“But from there I felt we fought really hard. We were playing well in our second innings and given a reasonable amount of luck we would have done better.

“I think we’ve been unlucky. We’ve had three fairly poor umpiring decisions that affected us badly in this second innings.”