Sickener for the Bears as Essex chase down 330

Cox, who hit 112 from 192 balls, was joined in a record fifth-wicket partnership against Warwickshire of 176 in 54 overs with Matt Critchley that took Esses within sight of their 330-run target.

Critchley, however, was left stranded on 99 not out from 184 balls when Simon Harmer pulled the winning boundary off Che Simmons quarter of an hour before the scheduled lunch interval on day four

Essex’s third win of the season kept them close on the heels of Surrey at the top of the Vitality County Championship. Warwickshire were left to rue what might have been.

Warwickshire captain Alex Davies said: “It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Congratulations to Essex, they played some bloody good cricket over the four days.

“I think losing last week at the Oval you can take that a little bit better because we got outperformed, but this week it was more of our own doing and that’s definitely harder to take.

“We’ve clearly lost the game in the third innings. Ed Barnard and Michael Burgess batted wonderfully in the first innings, but as a top-order we need to look at ourselves hard. We were 50-5 in both innings and we can’t expect the lower order to bail us out in both innings. We definitely lost the game there.

“The follow-on is obviously a contentious decision, but we couldn’t afford to enforce it really.

“We’ve got a lot of bowlers injured at the minute: Ollie has run in all year and he’s really feeling the pinch. We’ve got Michael Rae who’s not played a game of cricket in months so he was undercooked, and we’ve got Che on debut. So we needed to get those boys a bit of a rest. But if we’d batted anywhere near what we should have done it would have got them a nice rest.”