HAMPSHIRE star Ben Brown labelled as "a special week" beating County Championship leaders Surrey by more than an innings.

Hampshire followed up their first win of the season against Nottinghamshire with an innings and 278 runs win over Surrey at Utilita Bowl.

Wicket-keeper and batter Brown hit a stunning 165 from just 178 balls while Toby Albert and Nick Gubbins also topped a ton. 

Speaking after the match, Brown said: "It has been a pretty special week. It is one of those weeks where the majority of things we did went our way and to some extent, we played the perfect game.

“That doesn’t happen often in this game, especially against a side as good as Surrey. It has been an amazing week to be a part of and everyone is so happy, and so many people contributed to it.

“We’ve really struggled at the Oval but we feel like they’ve not done as well against us here, so we did come into the week confident – but we didn’t expect a game against Surrey to go all our own way, which this pretty much did."

He continued: "It was good to bat out there, albeit under not a great deal of pressure as the likes of Gubbo and Toby set it up. Me and Daws (Liam Dawson) were just able to play our shots, get the run rate up and have good fun.

“Shout out to Felix (Organ) for the way he bowled. Barks (Keith Barker) gave him some rough but it isn’t as easy as it looks for a young offie to put so many balls in good areas. He was our many hope and he handled the pressure brilliantly.

“We look at the fixtures and we knew the first seven games were tough on paper. We didn’t get off to the start we want but with the two wins in a row we would probably have taken this start to the season. The fixture list looks kinder to us in the second half of the season.”

Surrey head coach, Gareth Batty admitted: "Apart from winning the toss everywhere could be improved. It was a pretty good wicket all game and getting as little runs as we did in the game is the issue.

“Hampshire will probably be talking about playing their perfect game. They scored 600 runs and bowled us out for less than 203 twice. They have gone about their business very well.

“It isn’t all doom and gloom for our Championship campaign, we have really been quite excellent in six games but unfortunately this one went really quite badly.

“I hope this is a one-off – I would be very disappointed if it is not. I have huge belief in the whole group of players, I wouldn’t change our squad for anything, but we all have to understand that we weren’t as good as we can be in this game and we need to be better next time out.“