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Northants feast on Tuckshop’s massive plateful of joy
- Updated: August 20, 2016
T20 Finals Day: a long day’s journey into a floodlit evening of fireworks and fanfare.
T20 Finals Day: three hefty dollops of disappointment, one massive plateful of joy. The first three are staggered through the day; the joy is celebrated until light seeps under the door of night on a Sunday morning in Birmingham
T20 Finals Day 2016: short form, short showers and the beguiling transience of fame. Twelve months ago Gavin Griffiths and George Edwards were in the Lancashire side that won the Blast. Late last month both players were told they were being released. As Northants and Notts warmed up in early morning, it really was not cheesy to hope that a similar fate does not befall any of the players from the four teams competing this year.
Losing the first semi-final of the T20 is a bit like arriving at a party, putting your bottle on the table and then being told that it’s already time to leave. And well before three o’clock it was the Outlaws who had been handed their coats. Some of Dan Christian’s players may have got home by the time the final was due to start.
Mick Newell was sitting in that early press conference all four coaches wanted to avoid and bemoaning the failure of his batsmen to chase down 162. One of the many good things about Newell is that he does not wrap truth in euphemism: he had no problem about selecting Dré Russell because the bloke had been playing in ICC competitions; Notts were in a relegation battle at the bottom of Division One because they had not been playing well enough. Already Newell was thinking about Scarborough on Tuesday when Nottinghamshire will play Yorkshire.
Most people have long since ceased being surprised by Northants’ short-form cricket. Alex Wakely’s men have always punched above their weight, a particularly fine achievement in their case. All the same, their victory against the Outlaws was a considerable coup, not least because they had lost both Richard Gleeson and Seekkuge Prasanna from their full-strength T20 side. So while it was difficult to work out who Outlaws would leave out, it was also a little tricky to decide who the Steelbacks would call on.
Northants had played Notts in seven previous T20 matches and had won none of them. They ended that …
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