Five wickets for Dane Patterson and four for Brett Hutton consigned Kent to a rapid and damaging defeat in their LV= Insurance County Championship match at Trent Bridge, where they were bowled out for 85 to drop into the bottom two in Division One with only three matches to play.

Patterson finished with five for 41 in 10 overs, while Hutton’s four for 44 allowed him to celebrate a 50-wicket season for the first time in his first-class career, giving him 52 so far.

Kent skipper Jack Leaning’s 21 was a paltry top score as Kent, theoretically chasing 407 to win from 72 overs, were dismissed in just 21 and a half overs.

Earlier, Will Young and Ben Slater had both made 87 and Joe Clarke 73 before Nottinghamshire declared their second innings on 372 some 40 minutes or so before lunch.

The result gives Nottinghamshire 22 points, which is probably enough to ensure they remain in Division One for another season after being promoted in 2022.

Slater, his eyes on a second hundred in the match, fell to the fifth ball of the day, unable to add to his overnight score, but otherwise Nottinghamshire’s plans on how to set up a run chase could not have gone better.

If anything, they went too well, the scoreboard turning so rapidly that skipper Steven Mullaney might well have had to think again about when to declare given the overs left in the match. When he did decide the moment was right, some 196 runs had been added in just 78 minutes following Nottinghamshire’s resumption on 176 for one.

Of those, 114 came off just 77 balls in a blistering third-wicket stand between New Zealand’s Young, who made 87 in the last innings of his brief attachment to the county, and Clarke, whose 73 from 40 balls would have felt like the perfect preparation for his upcoming stint with Welsh Fire in The Hundred.

Clarke hit three sixes, matching Young’s tally of maximums in half the number of balls, and there were a couple each for Mullaney and Lyndon James, who hammered 42 in 18 balls for the sixth wicket before Mullaney’s dismissal, bowled aiming to inflict more damage in an Arafat Bhuiyan over that had already gone for 20, prompted the declaration.

Eventually caught at deep midwicket, Clarke should have gone for 26 but Arshdeep Singh, in his final outing for Kent, dropped a regulation catch at mid-off. Joey Evison, the disappointed bowler and Clarke’s former Trent Bridge team-mate, was only too aware of how costly that mistake might be.

Like Clarke, Young and Tom Moores were caught in the deep going for big returns as Nottinghamshire ultimately pushed the Kent target beyond 400, which was never likely to be a realistic ask of a side lacking so many front-line batters through injuries and international calls.

Yet draw still looked within their capabilities and the rapid unravelling of that possibility came as a surprise.

In the eight overs before lunch, their top three all departed. Toby Albert copped a beauty from Hutton to fall for a fourth-ball duck, Ben Geddes fell victim to a fine, rapid-reaction catch by Slater at short leg off Paterson and Ben Compton was leg before to a swinging ball as the South African celebrated his second success.

Lunch did nothing to stiffen Kent’s resolve, with Harry Finch soon leg before as Hutton claimed his 50th of the season, before Jack Leaning was caught behind off a bottom edge to make it 51.

Paterson had Evison caught low down at third slip and Matt Quinn on the boundary as a merrily brief innings ended with a top-edged pull. Alex Blake knew his fate immediately as he saw Mullaney readying himself for the catch as he heaved Hutton over midwicket and Arshdeep, having launched Paterson for six over the leg side, perished next ball, well caught by a diving Hutton at deep backward square attempting a repeat.

The two pacemen each took a breather after 10 overs, but Kent’s demise was quickly completed as Bhuiyan gave Haseeb Hameed’s leg breaks a maiden first-class wicket.

Nottinghamshire’s Dane Paterson, who took five for 41, said:

“It is a good result, very important for us looking at the table. It takes us away from the bottom three, which is a good situation to take into the break from red-ball cricket.

“The time lost in the game made it more difficult but we were determined to get a win out of this game because we knew its importance and we came out this morning ready to give everything.

“The way Joe (Clarke) and Will Young played this morning, getting runs so quickly from where we were overnight, set the game up to give us enough overs to bowl them out.

“We always wanted to have time to bowl 70 overs at them and we talked this morning about being positive but they were so quick we had time to slow the game down a bit if necessary.

“And with the start Brett and I made, at lunchtime we were really buzzing and knowing we had a couple of days’ break after this game we were ready to give it our all in what remained of the game to get the result. In the end, we finished it off very quickly.

“We could see this morning from the way Joey Evison bowled that there was still something in the pitch. With it being overcast this morning, conditions were good for bowling and if anything the pitch got a bit quicker, plus the bounce started to get a bit inconsistent.

“And Brett (Hutton) again was superb. The way he has been bowling this season, to get 50 wickets with four games left is an incredible achievement. He has worked so hard on his bowling. He has been, how can I say, in the shadow of Luke Fletcher and myself in the last couple of seasons and it is great to see him get his rewards. I’m really chuffed for him.

“He had an opportunity early in the season and he grabbed it. We’ve had a few injuries, but one of the good things about this bowling unit is that when someone is injured, the next person who comes in wants that chance to make an impression.”

Kent captain Jack Leaning said:

“For three days, we were right up with them competing, and then for an hour and a half today we were a mile away. It was pretty abysmal if I’m honest. They bowled well, they got quite a few wickets from good bowling  early doors, but ultimately a few of us got ourselves out.

“But we had a young team out there and I thought we actually did pretty well to stay in the game as long as we did.  If you take 10 players out of any side it would look a very different team and those injuries have all come at once for us.

“We didn’t bowl as well as we should have on the first day after winning the toss in pretty favourable conditions. Nottinghamshire probably scored 100 more than we should have.

“But then we scrapped well with the bat in the first innings. We had six scored between 30 and Finchy’s 70 and it only takes one of them to get a hundred and another to go to 70 or 80 and we go past them by a hundred runs and it is a very different perspective when they come out to bat second innings.

“As it was, they get a little lead and got off to a bit of a flyer and then it can be tough to get the game back in your court. But having said that we are making too many mistakes as a team, regardless of which team we have put out ourselves, and we’ve got to put that right pretty quickly or we are going to find ourselves playing in Division Two next season.

“On the positive side, we were in the same position last season and we ended up fifth, Cricket can be a funny game sometimes. We have a break for the 50-over competition now, where we are the defending champions.

“Nothing is a given. We need to make sure we get our heads right, go back to our solid plans that gave us success in the 50-over competition last year and stick to them, and stick together as a group because it is a tough time when failure keeps happening. You have to pick yourselves up and keep going and ultimately it will turn.

“Earlier in the season when we had a break for the T20 we came back with fresh impetus and hopefully that can happen again, and we can take some confidence into the final red ball games. Hopefully some of the injured players are not that far away from being ready to play again and we can come back in September and hit the ground running.”