County Championship: Surrey seal victory after Kent defiance

Surrey beat Kent by an innings and 37 runs in County Championship Division One despite defiant batting by the home side on the final day at Canterbury .

The reigning champions dismissed the hosts for 262 in their second innings, with Dan Worrall taking 4-31 and Cameron Steel 3-38.

Steel remains the leading wicket-taker in the country this season with 20 after three matches.

Joey Evison made 53 and Matt Parkinson hit his highest first-class score of 39 but after a dogged rearguard action that saw them through the morning session, Kent subsided midway through the afternoon.

The hosts were 120-5 overnight, still 179 runs in arrears, and their slim hopes were dealt a near-fatal blow when Ben Compton was caught behind off Worrall in the fifth over of the morning for 17.

Parkinson, promoted up the order to number eight, had spent the winter working on his batting as part of a concerted effort to shore up Kent's lower order and although there were a few alarms by lunch, Kent had reached 203-6 and the impossible now seemed merely improbable.

Evison, however, fell in the afternoon's third over. He cut Tom Lawes for fours off successive boundaries to reach his half-century but then edged him behind.

With Evison gone, Kent crumbled. George Garrett was lbw to Steel for five and Jas Singh went for a duck when Jamie Smith took a brilliant catch at short leg off the same bowler.

Number 11 Arafat Bhuiyan had some fun with the new ball, flicking three consecutive balls from Kemar Roach for a six and two fours on his way to his highest Championship score of 22 not out, making him the fourth Kent tail-ender to reach that personal landmark in this match after Garrett and Singh hit their career-best scores in the first innings.

This merely delayed Surrey's celebrations, however, and an emphatic victory was sealed when Smith took another exceptional close catch to snare Parkinson off Roach.

Report supplied by the ECB Reporters' Network.