Essex prevail on brilliant, mad night at Lord's

NICK FRIEND AT LORD'S: When Simon Harmer was the solitary man sprinting across the Lord’s square like a man chasing the last bus of the night, you would have been forgiven for wondering what on earth you had missed. The answer? Chaos. All the chaos.

Lord's: Middlesex 183-2, Essex 184-8 - Essex win by two wickets

Scorecard

When Essex needed 14 runs to win from 11 balls with two international cricketers at the crease, the last rites were being written and post-mortems prepared. Ten minutes later, when Simon Harmer was the solitary man sprinting across the Lord’s square like a man chasing the last bus of the night, you would have been forgiven for wondering what on earth you had missed.

The answer? Chaos. All the chaos. Chaos in a game that, despite its high scores, had passed by mostly without much freneticism. Game management out of no manual in the world, a blink-and-you-miss-it period that needed the theme tune of Benny Hill behind it, a collapse of club cricket proportions, final-ball drama that left 11 fielders dropping to their knees in desolation, a despairing dive from a short third man fielder who willed his arms to lengthen but knew his effort was hopelessly forlorn, two batsmen who knew they had clinched victory from the jaws of victory – but only via the jaws of defeat. All told, they lost 5 for 14 in 11 balls.

Simon Harmer was the last man standing, running laps of the square with his arms aloft – the same delirious, jump-for-joy celebrations as at Finals Day two years ago, when he performed a similar circuit of the playing area as he took in a last-gasp victory against Worcestershire in the only way his mind knew how: bedlam. Like a video-game character controlled by a novice, he veered off sharply to the left of the pitch, out of kilter with everyone else and out of sync with where his legs ought to have taken him, but dragged there by the sheer desire of his own emotions.

A ridiculous, astonishing end to a game Essex ought to have won more comfortably, when Dan Lawrence and Jimmy Neesham were at the crease and a class apart. When they fell three balls apart, the visitors were still obvious favourites: 10 off seven required, Ryan ten Doeschate and Paul Walter at the crease. But when they went in consecutive deliveries to Daryl Mitchell – not that one – on debut a day after his countrymen had become world Test champions, he must have thought the perfect 24 hours would have the perfect conclusion.

By contrast, Neesham has experienced the lowest of cricketing lows on this ground. One wonders whether that occasion – the World Cup final – ever entered his thoughts. Perhaps when he nailed Steven Finn into the Mound Stand as he did to Jofra Archer mid-super over, or perhaps when Aron Nijjar cut the fourth ball of the over to Nathan Sowter’s midriff at backward point with five still needed off two balls. But after a Sam Cook single left the game in Harmer’s hands, the South African did what he has done since arriving at Chelmsford in 2017: win games of cricket for Essex.

The scenes were remarkable – a tremendous advert for the return of fans to live sport. The collective gasp at full time, as the ball trickled helplessly towards the Warner Stand, told more of the story than any report possibly could.

It meant that Stevie Eskinazi’s maiden T20 century – in a losing cause, no less – felt many moons away. The control he exhibited was that of a different sport to the grand prix of anarchy in which the final throes were played out.

He isn’t the first cricketer to have seen a white-ball ascent come at the expense of his returns as a red-ball batsman. When Middlesex won the County Championship five years ago, he was still in the process of qualifying to represent England and being talked about as a top-order option to watch.

But like several of his colleagues at Lord’s, his output in the longest format has diminished ever since, so much so that after captaining Stuart Law’s side in the Bob Willis Trophy last summer and in the first two red-ball rounds this time around, he was jettisoned entirely for a month among the second string: in first-class cricket, he has averaged just 22.76 since the start of 2019.

Reportedly, he sniffed around for a short-term loan deal, and his current contract expires at the end of the season. Middlesex, though, is all Eskinazi has known since impressing sufficiently in league cricket for Stanmore – the boyhood club of Angus Fraser – to be offered his chance in the professional game. When he was recalled after a spell out of the firing line for a four-day trip to Leicestershire, he made starts in both innings without going on. As it happened, Middlesex were beaten at Grace Road, with the hosts recording the third-highest fourth-innings chase in their history.

In 2016, none of that would have sounded likely: they were a dominant four-day force and had only just lifted the title on a dramatic September evening after beating Yorkshire in front of a raucous crowd. Eskinazi, for his part, made 90 runs in the match. And back then, he had played just once in the T20 Blast, a competition that would become his calling card over the coming campaigns: 165 runs at 41.25 in 2017, 262 runs at 26.2 in 2018, 256 runs at 32 in 2019, all culminating in last year’s truncated tournament when 413 runs in 10 games made him the second-leading run-scorer nationwide – and comfortably the highest of those who failed to make it beyond the group phase.

Yet, when the draft for The Hundred took place in 2019, there were no takers. And when the partial redraft took place earlier this year, with the fillip of his 2020 resumé at his disposal, that story had not changed.

“You look around at some of the players who got picked up and you’re always comparing yourself as a player. You like to think that you could mix it with the best of these guys,” he told The Cricketer of his disappointment at the end of 2019. Because, for all the wider misgivings around the new competition, the squad selection process – from the perspective of a domestic cricketer – remains as good a gauge as any of the lie of the land. And, to put it bluntly, Eskinazi has gone unsold twice.

^{There were shades of Harmer's celebration from the 2019 final in his jubilation after hitting the winning runs}

But several on the county circuit have talked up the impact of the eight wildcard places in the early stages of the T20 Blast. The message has been straightforward: perform and lob your hat into the ring. Eskinazi, of course, could accurately point out that such a plan of action hasn’t helped beforehand.

Coming into this game, however, 70 runs in five Blast appearances this year was scarcely a come-and-get-me plea. But T20 cricket is a game of opportunity and, faced with the prospect of a Thursday night at Lord’s in front of a decent Covid-restricted audience, he grasped his moment, even if few will recall its details in the grand scheme of a night of absurd, barnstorming theatre.

Despite his red-ball struggles in recent times, Eskinazi still resembles a man with a classical background, only once properly losing his shape in a knock that spanned the entirety of Middlesex’s innings after being invited to bat first – and that fleeting agriculture came after having reached a mostly chanceless hundred.

It was a rare T20 century in that it relied, for the majority, far more on touch and grace than outright power. He had his moments: one of two sixes flew over the Father Time weathervane and out of Lord’s, while he check-drove over extra cover with plentiful elegance. Remarkably, this was just the second T20 hundred ever scored at the Home of Cricket: as fate would have it, the only man to achieve the feat previously was ten Doeschate, who could cast an admiring eye from his position in the field.

But if there was a minor criticism to be had in a 59-ball ton, perhaps it might have come sooner: Eskinazi reached fifty off the final ball of the eighth over, at which point Middlesex seemed primed for a bigger total than they ultimately accrued. The innings was one-paced, albeit that pace was nine runs per over. Once Joe Cracknell fell for 29 with the score on 80 in the ninth over, Mitchell rather dragged himself to 29 off 24 balls, before John Simpson added 17 in 12, including the biggest hit of the night to the long edge of the boundary.

Even with Paul Stirling and Eoin Morgan no longer available, a fair bit of Middlesex batting went unused, including Nick Gubbins – recalled for his first T20 outing of the year – a spectator with the bat, but worth his weight in the field as a permanent boundary-rider.

^{Dan Lawrence made a half century for Essex}

But where youngsters Cracknell, Blake Cullen and Luke Hollman have impressed for Middlesex, see Will Buttleman and Michael Pepper for Essex. The former smashed his first professional fifty last time out against Surrey and had already hit Tom Helm for six by the time he was run out in the fourth over; Pepper, meanwhile, led the way thereafter for 43 until he was caught and bowled.

At which point it was left to Lawrence – of England, Essex and Chingford – to take over. On an awkward-shaped playing area and with runs harder to come by straight back past the bowler, there could be few men in the domestic game better-placed to exploit those unusual dimensions: with his much-vaunted wrists, he drove through the off-side and worked the ball effortlessly into the legside. When the ante wanted upping, he went to fifty by whacking Helm over long on.

With him for company was Neesham, a man who knows this place all too well. He and Mitchell might have been forgiven for feeling worse for wear this evening, given yesterday’s events, but they played crucial, invaluable hands. Only one could end up on the winning side, however. And as Harmer danced in jubilation, punching the air with a brilliant, intense delight, he had ensured Essex came out on the right end of a game that – just briefly – they did everything to lose.

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