Meet Sol Budinger, Nottinghamshire's next white-ball hitter

NICK FRIEND: There are few sides in the country more difficult to enter as a top-order batsman than one featuring Alex Hales, Joe Clarke and Ben Duckett, but Budinger might just have the raw materials to break through

In Sol Budinger’s most recent second team T20 appearance, he was caught behind in the eleventh over for 114. He had faced 38 balls, half of which had flown to the boundary – six for four, 13 for six.

“Cricket is such a feel game,” he tells The Cricketer, reflecting on that knock. “Some days you feel it, some days you don’t. That hundred was one of those days where you go out and feel really good: I hit one six and thought I’d keep going. I felt good, but some days I don’t feel like that – you top-edge one and you’re out and you’re walking off.

“I’ve spoken to Peter Moores about my role, and he’s just told me to play my way.”

For that, he is at the right club. A left-handed opening batsman, his short professional career is only two months old; Budinger himself is just 21, though he will turn 22 two days after the final of the Royal London Cup which, even if he has not yet properly ignited to match-changing effect, has offered him a taste of the county game and, conversely, has introduced the domestic circuit to the next white-ball slugger off the Trent Bridge ranks. “It’s a good opportunity but I’m not really thinking about how big the month is,” he insists.

What he has lacked in tangible output thus far, he has displayed in his approach and an unwavering intent.

Against Surrey at Guildford, when Nottinghamshire were tasked with chasing 300 in 30 overs, he came out swinging: 45 off 21 balls was the result. Forty of those came in boundaries and 30 in a single Gus Atkinson over. To the uninitiated, it was an appropriate introduction; for Budinger, it was pretty much the ideal combination of glorious conditions and needs must.

“I said to Ben Slater after the second over that we could do this – if we were there in 15 overs’ time, I felt like we could win the game,” he explains. “That’s the attitude we had as a team; obviously, we didn’t get across the line but playing that fearless cricket and going out to still believe that we could win the game and to lose by 30 runs chasing 300 in 30 overs I thought was a great effort, to be fair.”

^{Sol Budinger has spoken to Joe Clarke and Ben Duckett about white-ball batting}

How, then, would he describe his game at the moment? “I just think it’s free-flowing, aggressive and putting the pressure back on the bowler.

“Growing up, my mum and dad just told me to go out and have fun. I’ve just been doing that, even now. I have fun without thinking about too much. Not everyone wants to score runs the way you do it, but everyone’s different.”

Born in Colchester, he moved to Australia aged six and only returned to the United Kingdom after finishing school and embarking on a gap year, where he played league cricket for Farnsfield, the club of Nottinghamshire assistant Paul Franks. Ant Botha is another member of the county’s coaching staff to whom he is indebted; it was on his recommendation that all this began.

“I trialled in a few second team games and then within a year I signed, so it happened quite quickly,” he says – tickets for a holiday with two friends around Europe to Spain and Greece were canned. Had things turned out differently, he would be back in Australia now, playing grade cricket in Brisbane and working in telesales for his father’s embroidery business – a job he undertook for two months to raise funds for his original trip over.

Those days weren’t long ago but they feel as though they belong in a distant past. There are few sides in the country more difficult to enter as a top-order batsman than one featuring Alex Hales, Joe Clarke and Ben Duckett – all three domestic guns. Not to mention Ben Slater, Budinger’s opening partner and the holder of an extraordinary List A record, with an average of 56.66 from a decent sample size.

“I’ve looked up to them, and I want to be where they are,” he says of the men in possession. “They’re great role models for me and the way that I want to go out and bat and dominate games, especially in the powerplay.”

When Budinger first signed professional terms in 2019, Nottinghamshire director of cricket Mick Newell gushed that “some of the innings I have witnessed him play for the second team have been amazing”.

^{Sol Budinger made his List A debut in the Royal London Cup}

The challenge facing him now is in replicating those knocks at a higher level, for which he has spoken to Hales, Clarke and Duckett.

“When I was younger, Alex helped me a lot through training,” he recalls. “I was in the squads but wasn’t playing. It was the way that he went about his work and how he trained: he used to go into the nets with a skinny bat against the bowlers.”

As for Clarke, the pair live together; and for everything that has happened in the career of the former Worcestershire batsman – remarkably, he already has 17 first-class centuries to his name – there is still only a four-year age gap between him and Budinger.

Duckett is the only left-hander of the trio for Budinger to use as a point of reference, and he has adapted his game significantly since first coming onto the scene in limited-over cricket with Northamptonshire. Budinger points to his range of sweeps: “I’d dream of playing shots like that.”

More than copying their stroke-play, however, he has taken more from their mindsets as white-ball hitters. Clarke hit 22 sixes in last year’s T20 Blast and scored his runs at a strike rate of 175, while Hales’ international pedigree hardly needs introduction. Duckett, for his part, has perhaps become the most malleable, drifting into the middle order from where he saw Nottinghamshire to victory to seal their T20 crown last October.

“Everyone has the ability as a pro cricketer, but I think when you go out to bat, you can’t be afraid to actually get out,” says Budinger, detailing what he has learnt from his peers. “You might get out a certain way one day, but the next time you bat you can’t be thinking about it. You have to be going out there with freedom and backing your ability.

Royal London Cup: Team of the week

“Especially with The Hundred now starting up and especially in the first 10 overs with two people out, it’s the best time to bat. The ball’s coming on and you’ve got a decent wicket; you can go at least at eight runs per over – that’s the way I look at it. That’s two shots per over for me, and you’ve got four other balls to do what you want.”

At some stage, Budinger will take down a bowling attack, whether or not that day comes in the Royal London Cup; if you chose him to bat for your life, you’d certainly be on the edge of your seat. With Trent Bridge as his home ground – the scene last month of Liam Livingstone’s T20I hundred and, previously, of England’s ODI world records – he is acutely aware of what is possible.

“I just think about how lucky I am as a batter and what a wonderful venue it actually is,” he adds. “I’m very fortunate to go out and bat there on one of the best wickets in the country.”