Outground cricket at its best: Surrey and Nottinghamshire serve up a Royal London treat

NICK FRIEND AT GUILDFORD: Elite athletes talk about those occasional out-of-body experiences, when everything clicks and the cloak of invincibility replaces any self-doubt or trepidation

Guildford: Surrey 311-8 (30 overs), Nottinghamshire 266-7 (30 overs) - Surrey win by 33 runs on DLS

Scorecard

Outground cricket is a unique beast: to the left of the press tent at Guildford sat a Luke Fletcher enthusiast wearing Surrey’s sky-blue T20 Blast jersey underneath an inflatable flamingo costume. He waited patiently for his moment at the end of a lengthy rain delay before professing his long-held admiration for the Nottinghamshire seamer and requesting a post-match shirt-swap. Quite what that would have looked like – and whether Fletcher was expected to don the pink rubber-ring-based bird – we will never know.

This was his stag-do: a Tuesday afternoon that swung between thundery rain and glorious sunshine at Guildford Cricket Club, lit up – perhaps surprisingly – by the big hitting of Ryan Patel, a man who before today had only ever cleared the rope five times as a professional cricketer of diminutive build. By the time he had clothed a short ball from Liam Patterson-White to the midwicket boundary-rider, he had trebled that figure.

Elite athletes talk about those occasional out-of-body experiences, when everything clicks and the cloak of invincibility replaces any self-doubt or trepidation. Presumably, this is what that looks and feels like: there were three consecutive sixes to begin an over from Matthew Montgomery, which seemed to flick the switch for the carnage that followed.

Patel, who had only scored 66 runs in 10 prior white-ball appearances, made 16 from his first 27 deliveries and then 115 from the next 43. “I’m still in a bit of shock myself,” he admitted afterwards. He wasn’t alone.

At this juncture, let’s make this quite clear: the pitch was absolutely fabulous, unless you were a bowler but especially if entertainment like this is your kind of thing. For the school of thought that favours low-scoring one-day games over this kind of chaos, I’m afraid this was a firm rejection.

In response to Surrey’s 311 for 8 in 30 overs – reduced to 300 for a reason unknown to those present, but courtesy of Duckworth-Lewis-Stern – Nottinghamshire reached fifty in the fourth over, including 30 off the third, bowled by Gus Atkinson. Oh, to be a bowler. Or, indeed, to be Notts captain Peter Trego, who bowled one over for 19, made a hash of a high catch and then nicked off for a second-ball duck to one of few deliveries on the entire afternoon that dared move sideways off the seam.

^{Guildford served up a fantastic game of cricket}

As one local quipped in the press box, they call it Woodbridge Road because it is a road. Not many club grounds could produce a wicket quite so true: in all, Surrey hit 23 sixes and 12 fours. Patel’s departure was offset by Jamie Smith, whose effortless brutality was such that his predecessor was hardly missed. Smith’s half century needed just 16 balls and his fifty-run partnership with Nico Reifer, who only contributed a single scoring shot, came up in 2.2 overs.

They were the highlights of an astonishing day that hadn’t seemed likely before 2pm, when the rain came down so heavily that its force initially surprised the groundstaff and left plenty of run-off on the edge of the covers. Surrey were eight overs into their innings when the heavens opened, with just 29 runs on the board. The only casualty in that initial salvo was Hashim Amla, who walked without waiting for a decision after gloving down the legside. Safe to say, you’d have got long odds at that stage on what followed. Twenty overs were lost from the innings to the early deluge, before Surrey used what remained to wreak unbridled havoc: 282 for 7 in 132 balls.

The magic of the game at a venue like this: 3,000 spectators taking in something quite scarcely believable. So clean was the ball-striking and so regularly were the marquees cleared at the Railway End that rapid cameos from Atkinson and Rikki Clarke – both smashing 15 off five balls – went almost unnoticed. Even Tim David’s clip off Dane Paterson – the biggest hit in a competitive field – by the end had been relegated to the status of just another six.

Quirks of Royal London Cup play to strengths of the Worcestershire way

On days like this, though, with the audience tightly packed within touching distance of the boundary edge, it is impossible not to feel slightly apprehensive. In accordance with Covid regulations, the tannoy announcer was dutybound to remind punters not to touch the ball with their hands and instead to kick it back into play to prevent countless sanitisation delays. Quite how they could be reasonably expected to pull that off, given the frequency with which they were targeted by a fast-flying white bomblet, was anyone’s guess.

Perhaps the most perilous moments of the day, however, came when Clarke and Dane Schadendorf – two men at contrasting ends of their cricketing lives – cleared the Woodbridge Road fencing, endangering any passers-by and the patrons of the adjacent Wild Bean Café.

Schadendorf’s strike caused a particularly amusing delay: a good samaritan required four attempts to return the match-ball, with his first three throws rebounding off the fence and back into the street, where the traffic had stopped to witness this impromptu Olympic discipline.

^{Ben Slater led Nottinghamshire's defiant response; he averages 56.96 in List A cricket}

Another ball, dispatched into a nearby garden, was returned by a generous neighbour in the game’s final throes, by which point Nottinghamshire had lost their way.

As so often in games that follow this pattern, the chasers ultimately ran out of steam, but not before they had given this a bloody good go. After the fall of Sol Budinger, a young left-hander with a glorious degree of cavalier abandon, Surrey managed the rate with a semi-regular flow of wickets: Ben Slater’s 69 was in vain and, while Peter Moores’ men had already inside 10 overs eclipsed the number of fours hit in the entire innings by their hosts, they ended 15 behind in the six count, where the difference lay in the end. All told, 577 runs were scored in 60 overs. On that account, Matt Dunn deserved a medal for his spell, which included – extraordinarily – a double-wicket maiden.

The final slice of defiance came from Joey Evison, who smashed 54. He had earlier been one of eight bowlers to be taken for more than nine runs per over. And when he was caught with 17 balls remaining, it brought Fletcher to the crease to the acclaim of his watching fan club, who – like all those present – had been treated to far more than they bargained for.

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