In the money-orientated world of modern-day professional sport £40,000 isn't a lot.

A week's wages for Joe Average in the Premiership perhaps or enough to keep a Formula One car on the track for the weekend.

It does not seem a suitable reward for the team which has slogged its way through a gruelling summer of Championship cricket and finishes second.

But try telling that to the Sussex players.

It might be the last week of the season at Hove, and runners-up spot behind Nottinghamshire is by no means guaranteed, but they approached the final game of the summer with the same intensity as the 17 which preceded it.

Chris Adams is desperate that the Peter Moores' era does not end with a damp squib. It helps that one of his strike bowlers must wish the season was just starting rather than in its dying embers.

Rana Naved might turn out to be the scourge of the English batsmen later this year but he is not finished with the protagonists at county level just yet.

Four more wickets yesterday on an easy-paced pitch at Hove took to 52 in the Championship in just his ninth game.

Had he been here from the start it could well have been Sussex rather than Nottinghamshire celebrating this week, even though the physical effects of an English season would surely have taken their toll.

Adams' hardest job since he arrived has been getting the ball off Rana for he would willingly bowl all day. Yesterday he sent down four spells with peppery hostility, the last of which included wickets in successive deliveries.

James Kirtley lost nothing in comparison by taking 4-53 and with Mushtaq Ahmed wheeling away for 28 overs either side of lunch there was never much respite for the Kent batsmen.

One or two of them were compliant in their own downfall with shots which, had there been a bit more than £40,000 at stake, they might not have risked.

Sparky contributions down the order from Niall O'Brien and Min Patel put the established batsmen to shame as Kent recovered from 28-3 and 169-7 to make 257.

They will still feel they missed out in conditions that are unlikely to be bettered at this stage of the summer with warm sunshine and a flat pitch offering only occasional steep bounce.

Of the top six, Darren Stevens, Matt Walker and Nick Dexter all got past 25 but no one got beyond 34 after the top three had been and gone in the first hour.

Rob Key's falibility early in his innings was exposed when Rana pinned him leg-before only half-forward in his second over and Kirtley benefitted from mis-timed pull shots by Martin van Jaarsveld and captain David Fulton, whose claim before the match that Sussex had the best balanced attack in the country rang true.

Stevens has had an outstanding first season after leaving Leicestershire with more than 1,200 runs and looked the part until he thinedged a ball to give Rana his 50th wicket.

When Kirtley got some extra bounce to unseat Walker shortly after lunch Kent were reeling but they were pulled around in a perky sixth-wicket stand of 66 in 18 overs between Dexter, in his second Championship game, and O'Brien.

Adams summoned Rana for another burst and it did the trick. Dexter top-edged a pull to long leg and James Tredwell was lbw to the next delivery.

Patel dug out the hat-trick ball and was soon taking the attack to Mushtaq, hitting him for two sixes over the short boundary on the scoreboard side.

Kirtley came back and removed O'Brien, whose 61 off 76 balls included seven fours and two sixes, but Patel found a reliable partner in Martin Saggers and the ninth wicket pair added 55.

With Murray Goodwin and Ian Ward missing there are opportunities for younger batsmen but Carl Hopkinson missed out.

Coming back for a fourth after driving to long off, he was beaten by a combination of Saggers' throw from the boundary to mid off and Patel's subsequent direct hit.

Richard Montgomerie might still have been wondering about his part in the dismissal when he lost his middle stump to the next ball but Mike Yardy and Tim Ambrose batted sensibly in the last hour.