A half-empty Trent Bridge for a major domestic quarter-final. The ECB really fucked up here.
It didn’t take a forward planning genius to work out even six months ago that Wednesday evening was a potential World Cup semi-final for England in the football. A 4:30 pm start for such a high-profile Blast match is crap.
Surrey travelled up to Trent Bridge for the latest instalment in what is becoming something of a recently developed rivalry. It is starting to heat up rather nicely.
Notts didn’t hang around as they opened the batting. Haynes was on a charge. He was helped by some comedy fielding overthrows, not once but twice, from the ‘rrey.
The consensus on the Notts YouTube channel seemed to be that 150 seemed par for this pitch. Runs were hard to come by but Notts were making a decent fist of it.
A breakthrough came for Surrey with CJ taking two wickets and setting himself up for a hat-trick. The second wicket in particular was pretty special, sending furniture all around.
Notts then got penalised for a run short. I wasn’t even aware that this was such a thing in cricket.
A particularly expensive final over from the not so death bowler TC didn’t exactly help Surrey.
A quick break and then up stepped J-Roy and Laurie Evans to try and get Surrey over the line. J-Roy in particular looked up for the challenge. He slogged Paterson White for 14 of his first over.
It was all going so well for Surrey with J-Roy reaching his half-century of only 32 balls. We were in control of the game and were leaning on our experience to get the job done.
It then got a little squeaky bum time as the run rate reduced. I was surprised to see Fernando bowl once again for Notts after looking like he had broken his finger in attempting a caught and bowled.
The boundaries dried up for Surrey. Hang on, we’re really up against it here. How the fuck did that happen?
A superb final over from Ollie Stone saw Notts over the line.
And so Surrey miss out yet again on the Blast. Hopefully this will finally put to bed all that mainstream media narrative of Surrey being the darlings of the T20. We were almost a quarter of a century ago but not a lot has happened since then.
Oh well. That will make for a stress-free Finals Day viewing on Saturday.