Championship Rewind: Essex v Warwickshire, 2008

When Warwickshire face champions Essex at Chelmsford this week, it will be very welcome if one of their batsmen bats for two minutes short of ten hours.

That takes some doing but there is a precedent. That's what Tony Frost did at the Essex HQ in September 2008 to underpin a memorable six-wicket victory which sealed the Bears' promotion to Division One.

That promotion, at the end of Ashley Giles's first season as director of cricket, crowned an impressive bounce back from the wretched relegation of 2007. Giles had rebooted and rebuilt the side and one of his first moves had been to persuade wicketkeeper/batsman Frost to return to the playing unit from which he had retired in 2006 to train as a groundsman.

The switch was a spectacular success as Frost finished top of the national batting averages with 1,003 championship runs at 83.58. Of those runs, 380 arrived in the game at Chelmsford.

In the first innings, when the Bears replied to 341, Frost went in at number three and scored an unbeaten 242 in 550 minutes from 466 balls with 30 fours and a six. He added another 38 in the second innings to see his side to victory - and promotion - with 35 balls to spare.

It is a match, and a year, on which Frost, now batting coach at Edgbaston, reflects with great pride.

"It was a proud game for me on a personal basis and for the team as we clinched promotion," he said. "You always look back on your career-best with pride so Chelmsford will always have that memory for me.

"That was a special season. I scored a few runs that year and a hard of work had gone into it after I went back into the team from the groundstaff.

"That was the longest innings I played but I found it quite easy to concentrate for long periods. I think that came from being a wicketkeeper. You can't just switch on and off behind the stumps, you are in the game all the time, so I think I took that concentration level into my batting."

Since retiring from playing for the final time at the end of the 2009 season, Frost has built a strong reputation as a batting coach at Edgbaston. He has been influential in the emergence of the likes of Rob Yates and Dan Mousley into Warwickshire's first team and in Dom Sibley establishment as an England player.

After suffering a broken finger, Sibley is hoping to return to the team at Chelmsford this week where Frost knows the Bears will have to be at their best as the champions look for revenge for their seven-wicket defeat at Edgbaston last month.

"We haven't been there too often in recent years but the last time we went, in 2019, we were well beaten," he said. "They are a very strong side and we know it will be a tough game but we have just got to go down there and try to play as well as we did when we beat them at Edgbaston."