A return visit to Lord's this season looks a long way off for Sussex after they came up short at the Rose Bowl yesterday.

The FP Trophy holders did well to recover from a terrible start against Hampshire Hawks when they lurched to 58-5 after Chris Adams won his first toss of the season.

Richard Montgomerie led the recovery with 89 and ushered them to 201 in the end.

But although Sussex were committed in the field and with the ball, Sean Ervine led Hampshire to a comfortable victory with an unbeaten half-century.

Chris Nash obliged with his first one-day wicket when Chris Adams threw him the ball in the 39th over but it was too late to make a decisive impact.

Michael Lumb's patient 66 underpinned Hampshire's reply in a similar way to Montgomerie and the Hawks wrapped up their first win over Sussex in the 50-over format in five attempts with 11 balls to spare.

Sussex coach Mark Robinson said: "It's disappointing - we were probably 40 runs short when we batted.

"In a way it is mirroring this competition last year when we didn't really start playing until we were three wickets down.

"But you can't keep doing that and expect to keep getting out of jail.

"There were positives though. I thought Rana Naved, James Kirtley and Robin Martin-Jenkins were outstanding when we bowled but it obviously means the Surrey is very important now. The good thing is that it's at Hove where we have a good record in one-day cricket in the last few years."

The stoical Montgomerie certainly did not deserve to be on the losing side.

With hundreds in the Sharks' first two games he has now scored 345 runs in four innings and without him they might have sunk without trace.

After a run of bad luck with the toss Adams probably felt compelled to bat first when the coin finally fell in his favour even though the pitch, which was used on Friday for a tied match against Somerset, was typically two-paced.

But while Montgomerie stood firm at one end, Sussex lost their first five wickets in 23 overs.

Australian Stuart Clark, the scourge of English batsmen in the Ashes last winter, bowled a superb new ball spell which brought him two wickets including Adams and might have been even more productive.

Clark and skipper Shane Warne had clearly got a plan for the Sussex captain. The 6ft 6in giant from New South Wales bowled two successive short balls which Adams ducked under but he could not resist trying to pull a third and gloved tamely to the wicketkeeper.

It was Warne, however, who got the key wicket of Murray Goodwin in his second over the day after Goodwin's heroics in the Championship.

Not that Goodwin liked the decision when he touched a leg break to the wicketkeeper, clearly of the opinion that the ball had brushed his pad rather than the bat. He looked to have a case.

Sussex had promoted Luke Wright to No. 3 to try to take advantage of the fielding restrictions but he toe-ended to mid-on after biffing a couple of boundaries while Carl Hopkinson unluckily got an inside edge trying to play aggressively against Warne.

It was left to Montgomerie and Andrew Hodd to rebuild the innings in a stand of 62 in 16 overs but just when Hodd was looking to push on he made room to cut Ervine's medium-pace and fatally over-balanced.

Rana Naved did tee off against Ervine, hitting him for two sixes and two fours in successive balls but the fireworks were all too brief and it was left to Montgomerie to steer the side towards respectability. His runs came off 145 balls, contained a six and only three boundaries and it only ended when he was run out in the last over.

Rana and Kirtley conceded just 34 runs in 13 overs with the new ball and Rana had Chris Benham caught behind.

Wickets in successive overs kept their hopes alive as Michael Carberry mis-timed a pull and John Crawley chipped a leg break back to Mushtaq.

But it was relatively plain sailing for Hampshire after that. Lumb - a player Sussex were interesting in signing last winter - and Ervine played risk-free cricket in a match-winning stand of 82.

Sussex have five games left and they might have to win all of them to reach the semi-finals - starting against Surrey under lights at Hove on Tuesday (2.40pm).

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