County cricket: Lancashire, Sussex and Somerset lead way in T20 Blast

The Guardian

4 days ago

When the Nationwide Building Society sponsored the three tiers below the Premier League from 1996 to 2004, research showed strong name recognition from football fans. However, further research showed that people believed 'nationwide' referred to the fact that the clubs were drawn from all over the country and were unaware of the provider of loans to the bright-eyed twentysomethings still ​10 years away from hearing the dreaded phrase 'credit crunch'.
The Vitality Blast invites a similar misapprehension. Launched just as England gets its international season underway, with an England Lions match and the never​-ending IPL also claiming players, who could deny that the county game needs a blast of vitality? Vitality is not just a (very welcome) sponsor. It is also a call to arms for a competition that is critical​ to county cricket yet is seemingly shunted into whatever gaps are left when the ECB's circus music stops.
Lancashire spent the first eight weeks of the season racking up more club statements than wins, last week's offering opening starkly: 'Lancashire Cricket can confirm that Dale Benkenstein has left his position as Men's Head Coach by mutual consent.'
Steven Croft has assumed the position of head coach and set about a re-building job, with ex-Championship captain Keaton Jennings leading on the field. It's not as radical a change as some Lanky fans would have wanted, but they are top of the North Group with three wins from three.
Jennings has led from the front with scores of 66, 95 and 24 and he was able to watch his coach's old mate, James Anderson, knock the top off Durham's innings with a spell of 3 for 17 in his four overs, which went a long way to rounding off the hat-trick. It's early days, but the clouds around Manchester are lifting.
Northamptonshire are the other county in the North Group with a 100% record after wins over Yorkshire and Leicestershire.
If 35-year-old captain David Willey (54 off 27 and 3 for 42), was the key figure in the first win, delivering the almost cliched strong performance on returning to an old club, it was a fellow member of the 'Anderson Brigade' who got Northants over the line in the low-scoring second match of the campaign.
The 40-year-old Ravi Bopara conceded 16 runs in his three overs and then compiled 46 across 15 overs batting to take the score from 25 for 2 in the fifth to 123 for 5 in the 20th. I guess you learn that sort of nous in the course of 480 T20 matches.
Sussex and Somerset top the nascent South Group, having won both of their opening fixtures, with the former nudging ahead on net run rate.
Writing this column necessitates quite a lot of the eyeing of scorecards which, in turn, lends itself to certain names hoving into view more often than others. Harry Brook's avalanche of runs just before his selection for England was a case in point, as was Dan Worrall's relentless wicket-taking for Surrey. But the names that crop up most often are the players who make things happen and find ways to affect the game. They can be patronised by some but I've always liked so-called 'bits and pieces merchants'. That's what growing up on a diet of Barry Wood, David Hughes and Flat Jack does for you.
That phrase would be damning Sussex's James Coles with the faintest of praise though, because the 21-year-old is enjoying a marvellous season. In at ​N​o 4 in the Blast, he opened the campaign with 77 not out and three overs for 21 against Middlesex and backed it up with 43 and 2 for 26 against Gloucestershire. Hard-hitting middle-order bats who can be relied upon for some useful slow left arm after the powerplay is done are extremely valuable assets in white-ball cricket. Coles can expect a lot of work and a lot of mentions this season.
On paper, where nothing is won and only fools are made, opening fixtures against Surrey and Essex looked like a rude awakening for Somerset's T20 outfit. No matter – both were won in some comfort.
Only Jason Roy, with a remarkable 92 from 146 for 9, was able to resist the Antipodean stranglehold exerted by the Kiwi, Matt Henry (3-21), and the Aussie, Riley Meredith (3-26), as Surrey went down at Taunton.
Chelmsford was an illustration of how Twenty20 is played in the 2020s. There was a time when a middling target of 149 would be chased with a middling strategy – attack in the powerplay, then accumulate and accelerate towards the back end with wickets in hand. Not for Will Smeed and the Tom-Tom-Tom club of Lammonby, Kohler-Cadmore and Abell at the other end, who went off hard and kept going, the runs hammered out with 20% of the available deliveries in hand.
Somerset won all four of their matches in May and have started June in the same vein. Next up? Sussex on Friday night.
Blast games can come thick and fast with little time available to pull yourself out of a bad trot. Take the Birmingham Bears. On Friday night, they were ambushed at Trent Bridge by a superb Nottinghamshire chase that took down 227 with five balls in hand, Joe Clarke and Jack Haynes making 147 off 64 balls between them. A few hours later, they were back at Edgbaston and 4 for 3 against Durham's canny Callum Parkinson and pacy Zakary Foulkes – there was no coming back from there.
I can raise an eyebrow (like most of us who remember the days of a Championship match starting on a Saturday, with a John Player Sunday League game in the middle and a Gillette Cup match on the end) when today's players complain of workloads. Nevertheless, scheduling those two matches to be played out in less than 24 hours on two different grounds – no doubt at the behest of TV – is unfair to players and fans.
This article is from The 99.94 Cricket Blog