With three T20 Blast titles, Ben Duckett is part of a pretty exclusive club

NICK FRIEND: Duckett has experienced plenty and felt the full range of emotions at the disposal of the game’s shortest format

Ben Duckett is the youngest man on a short list: one of only four cricketers to have won English cricket’s domestic T20 title on three occasions. Twice with Northamptonshire, once with Nottinghamshire. Paul Nixon, Claude Henderson, Dan Christian and Duckett.

It is an exclusive club – and even more so at 26 years of age, with the chance this year – and over the course of the next decade – to set a new benchmark. Certainly, his current side have all the makings of a dynasty: champions last year despite the injury-enforced absence of Harry Gurney, who has since retired. Should they retain their title this time around, they will do so without Christian, their talismanic captain and the major presence on Finals Day in 2020. He has been recalled by Australia for their tours of West Indies and Bangladesh.

“Old guys win stuff,” went the mantra of Christian ahead of last year’s competition – the idea that those who have seen all that T20 cricket has to offer are best-placed to deal with whatever curveballs are thrown in their direction.

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Duckett is no old guy, but he has experienced plenty and felt the full range of emotions at the disposal of the game’s shortest format. “I’ve seen most results there, whether they’ve been good or bad,” he said, speaking about Finals Day – the jewel in the crown of county cricket – ahead of the start of Nottinghamshire’s title defence.

No team has ever retained the trophy, and though few have looked quite so well-equipped as Nottinghamshire, none have come closer than Worcestershire two summers ago, when Duckett assisted with a helping hand of his own. He ended unbeaten on 49 in a one-run defeat in the semi-final at Edgbaston, squatting devastated on his haunches as his county lost from a position of seemingly interminable strength, scything at Wayne Parnell’s last delivery and failing to make any contact. A roar of disbelief engulfed Edgbaston; on commentary, David Lloyd could only muster: “Oh no, it's the Rapids.”

It was a defining image and a personal turning point: in the Bob Willis Trophy, his first meaningful cricket thereafter, he churned out 394 runs at an average of 56.28 – only five players scored more. And when Nottinghamshire returned to Finals Day, wiser for the disappointment of 12 months earlier, it was Duckett who hit the winning runs against Surrey, righting wrongs that – by his own admission – acted as significant motivation.

^{Ben Duckett ended the 2019 on his haunches, having missed the last ball of Notts' semi-final against Worcestershire to lose by one run}

“It was a journey,” he noted. “After playing on a big stage, you might not get that opportunity again for three or four years. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity again 12 months later to put it right. Three or four times last year, I was there not out at the end. I said after we lost that semi-final to Worcester that I want to be the man in the big moments. It’s all good saying it, and me saying it people might not believe it, but it’s nice to be there at the end and to stay very calm when we were struggling in that final to get us over the line.”

He is a fitter cricketer as well, placing greater emphasis on looking after his body and understanding the benefits of that approach. He found last summer that simply walking into a ground in the knowledge that he was in better shape than most helped him mentally and kept his mind fresh. “It’s something I wish I had done four or five years ago,” he admitted, “but certainly now for the next however long I play the game it’s definitely something that I am going to keep in my game.”

He has begun the 2021 campaign without quite the same spree of runs as in 2020, passing fifty just twice in 13 County Championship innings, though he converted one of those into an unbeaten 177. As a team, however, Trent Bridge seems a happy place to be at the moment; the three-year wait for a red-ball victory has been extinguished and they sit third – just five points behind leaders Warwickshire – in a tightly-contested group.

Ben Duckett learns from 2019 disappointment

The Blast, though, is a different world, where Notts Outlaws carry an aura founded on a roster of star names and a recent history that has seen them reach Finals Day in four of the last five years. In 2020, they lost just once – against Leicestershire during the group stage, who almost repeated the trick in the quarter-final, only to slip up when it mattered most at the death. When Finals Day came, it brought convincing wins over Lancashire and Surrey, completed with the swagger of a team that knew – from its own learnings of the past – exactly how to win. The key, then, to Nottinghamshire’s success?

“I don’t think we ever get complacent,” said Duckett. “I think the only time we did was maybe in that quarter-final against Leicester. And it shows in a game like that, you slip up or you are complacent for 20 minutes and you believe you are going to win the game in a T20 game you could lose it in that space of time. Thankfully for us there were a couple of mistakes in the field and we got through, but I think that was a big wake up call for us.

“When you look down the side you know that someone is going to have a day out and in a T20 team if one person has a day out, or two people have a day out, you are probably going to win the game.”

^{Duckett one his first two T20 Blast titles with Northamptonshire}

And what of Northamptonshire, where Duckett grew up and won his first two titles in a youthful, unfashionable team? Josh Cobb was man of the match in the 2016 final, David Willey three years earlier. Otherwise, they were captained on both occasions by Alex Wakely, whose recent retirement was met with touching tributes from several of his teammates from those campaigns; Duckett lauded a “legend”, who led the likes of Richard Levi, Azharullah, Steven Crook and Rory Kleinveldt to two of the tournament’s more memorable triumphs.

He recalled: “I think looking at that side, we had a close-knit group of people who were having fun. We were the underdogs every single time, no matter whether we were playing well or not. We were always the underdogs, which we loved there.

“You only have to put the two sides next to each other. This Notts team has got world-class players right through the side who are experienced. That Northants side had quite a lot of young players, inexperienced players. Two very different sides but just as special winning it with both of them.

“I think that over the last ten years Notts have been so strong and they have dealt with that. When we go to most places we are expected to go and win. To be honest, as a squad, I don’t feel that there is any pressure on that.”

This year’s Vitality Blast Finals Day will be supporting the Professional Cricketers’ Trust, the PCA’s registered charity which supports professional cricketers and their immediate families when they have fallen on hard times. The Trust will collaborate with the ECB and Sky Sports to both showcase the work of, and raise funds for, the players’ charity as Finals Day returns to Edgbaston on 18 September.

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