How Durham's generosity helped Evans get his eye in before Sharks' quarter-final success

SAM MORSHEAD: On the morning of Sussex’s T20 Blast quarter-final at Durham, Evans found himself fidgeting about his hotel room. He was itching for a game of golf. Thanks to the opposition, he got his wish...

^{Laurie Evans is in fine form for Sussex Sharks in the T20 Blast}

Somerset be warned, don't let Laurie Evans anywhere near a set of golf clubs in the early hours of Finals Day.

On the morning of Sussex’s T20 Blast quarter-final at Durham, Evans found himself fidgeting about his hotel room.

The Sharks’ in-form batsman is not one to focus on the intensity of a game too far ahead of time and, with hours to spare and little to do, he was itching for an escape route.

There was only one thing on his mind.

Evans, you see, has made it his mission to play each of the top 100 courses in the UK and, as it so happens, the Riverside is only a 45-minute drive from Seaton Carew, the 10th oldest in the country and one he had yet to tick off his list.

Evans has hit six half-centuries in the tournament

There was one problem. Transport.

“I knocked on the window of a guy who had quite a nice office over-looking the ground,” Evans tells The Cricketer.

“He opened the door, he looked well-dressed, he had a nice office with a meeting room next door to it. I asked if he had a car I could borrow.

“He said ‘yeah, yeah, we can do that for you’. I started putting the pieces together and said ‘what’s your role here?’”

The kindly man in the suit turned out to be Durham chief executive Tim Bostock.

“I started laughing and said ‘I’m so sorry’,” Evans continues.

“It turned out he was a massive golfer, he played off one and been around Augusta a couple of times. He was more than happy to help fuel my habit."

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Evans got his hands on the Durham club van and, a few hours later, returned having hit a 71. One way to get your eye in.

“He (Bostock) told me ‘well you better not hit them as well tonight’. I told him I couldn’t promise that,” says Evans.

The rest is history, of course. The 30-year-old carted the Durham attack for 63 from 47 balls to see his team to a five-wicket win with 10 deliveries to spare.

“Funnily enough, he actually handed me the man of the match,” Evans says of the Durham chief exec. “He had a look in his eye when he did.”

Evans’ relatively happy-go-lucky approach to the game - an attitude which has served him pretty well this season, with 554 runs and six half-centuries coming at a strike rate of 138.50 -  is a byproduct of the atmosphere cultivated at Hove by head coach Jason Gillespie.

The batsman has told a story of how Durham helped him get his eye in before the quarter-final

Since his arrival in the spring, Gillespie has won the Sussex squad over with his relaxed demeanour and, Evans says, the players have been quick to adopt the same cricketing mantra.

“Dizzy has been amazing,” he says. “He’s brought a sense of calm and enjoyment to Sussex Cricket again. Even when I was at other clubs, Sussex were always looked at as being quite an intense club.

“They always punch above their weight a little bit and they’ve had some great success down the years but in recent years, since the last bit of success, there’s been something missing and someone like Dizzy has been able to fit that last piece of the puzzle in.

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“We’ve got a lot of talent - homegrown from Sussex - and we’ve got people in the squad in the right position to start striking for silverware. There are a lot of players in their mid to late-20s so hopefully this is the start of something exciting and Dizzy is a big part of it.”

It was Gillespie’s idea, for example, to turn the long quarter-final trip to Durham into something of a mini-break - four days away for three hours of cricket.

The victory at the Riverside was celebrated with a night out in Newcastle before the head coach organised a team pub lunch on the long trip home.

Had the Sharks struggled in each others’ company, it might have been a challenger. But this group of players have no such issues. In fact, Evans describes the decision as “a stroke of genius”.

“I certainly feel I’ve never seen a group of players get on so well as the Sussex boys do,” he says.

Evans and Sussex face Somerset in Saturday's semi-final

“You could argue that one of the downfalls of being a big club, a Test-ground club like Warwickshire, is you’ve got fine players but they’ve got a level of ego. You look at the smaller clubs and there are fine players in there but they don’t have the ego of other teams.

“I think that brings a great humility to what we do and everyone is chuffed for each other’s success. It’s a great changing room to be in.”

His team-mates must have been chuffed for Evans on an awful lot of occasions in 2018, given his impressive white-ball form.

Only Aaron Finch has more runs in the Blast this year - the Sussex man can go past the power-punching Australian with 36 runs on Finals Day - and in a team lauded for its bowling depth, Evans’ consistency with the bat has been vital in his side’s march to the last four.

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He is adamant, though, that there is no one man on whom the Sharks depend - not himself, not the firecracker allrounder Jofra Archer, not even Afghanistan legspinner Rashid Khan who contributed 17 wickets at an economy of 6.59 in the group stages but misses Edgbaston.

“Any team he’s gone into around the world has had amazing success,” Evans says of Khan.

“His record in terms of winning games is extraordinary and speaks for itself, let alone his individual performances.

“Saying that, it says a lot about the character of the club when you’ve got someone like Will Beer - who is our highest wicket-taker in that format - sat on the sidelines pretty much for the whole competition and then, we we needed him to perform, he comes in at Durham and he and Briggsy have effectively won us the game.

“That says a lot about who he is and the character of the squad. You take Rash out and you feel like you’re missing something but Beery has done an amazing job under pressure.”

So then… when the pressure is at its most intense, can Sussex hold their nerve?

We won’t have to wait long to find out.