Teenage Middlesex seamer Ethan Bamber felt his side had done well to hold Gloucestershire to 208-7 on day one of their County Championship Division Two clash in Bristol.

Home skipper Chris Dent (83) batted for four hours before falling to Middlesex captain Dawid Malan, as Bamber (2-50), James Harris (2-50) and James Fuller (2-46) all nabbed braces.

And Bamber, playing only his third first-class match, said: “It was an attritional day of good old fashioned county cricket.

“We’ve played on a lot of decks where wickets have come quickly and things have happened fast. We had to work really hard on this one and Tim Murtagh did brilliantly to bowl 21 overs for 25 runs.

“James Fuller also put in a class performance and I thought we bowled well as a unit on a tough track. There was not a lot of movement and it did not swing until about the 60th over, so we had to be really disciplined in the way we bowled.

“You can see from the way Chris Dent batted for them, that runs can be scored if you are patient. It’s hard to dislodge batters, so this is a pretty good day for us.

“It was good to get a couple of wickets myself, but this is just the start and there is a lot more to come.”