Surrey take on Northamptonshire in the Vitality Blast on Wednesday evening – 20 years on from one of the most dramatic T20 nights that the Kia Oval has seen. Richard Spiller looks back
Champions in the first year of the competition, runners-up in the second, Surrey had already established themselves as a formidable team in T20 cricket by 2005.
They were hosting finals day too, so having finished top of the South Division, winning five out of eight matches, a home quarter-final against Warwickshire was the ideal opportunity to book a slot.
If only it was so easy as all that. A faltering display with the bat saw the hosts reach 149-8, James Benning (22) and Scott Newman (28) making early progress but needing skipper Mark Ramprakash – batting down the order at seven – to make the total defendable by finishing unbeaten on 34 from as many balls.
But Warwickshire weren’t finding it easy either, pinch hitter Neil Carter departing for a duck and Nick Knight run out for three to leave them 25-2 in the fifth over when it started raining.
That cost five overs and when the teams returned, the Bears had a revised target of 118 from 15. All clear so far then….
With three overs left, they still had to get 32 and that had boiled down to 14 from the last six balls. As the tension cranked up, Azhar Mahmood showed all his experience for Pakistan so that seven were needed from the final two deliveries. But Dewald Pretorius managed to squeeze a boundary, so now it was three from one.
At that point, Ramprakash interrupted play to ask a logical question – what happens if they score two?
Umpires David Constant and Allan Jones consulted and told him that it would give Surrey the win. Mahmood duly kept it down to two, so the hosts celebrated reaching finals day.
Hang on a minute.
The ECB’s operations manager, Alan Fordham, intervened to remind the officials that a rule change meant that counted as a tie. Pandemonium and one very displeased Ramprakash, who had to garner his resources for a bowlout.
It was 9pm by now, 35 minutes after the match had finished, and The Oval did not have lights at that time, so that the patchy daylight was steadily fading.
A carrot-dominated diet were prerequisites for success now, the bowlout reaching 2-2 when it went to sudden death in a session which had lasted 20 minutes.
Up stepped Tim Murtagh, who had already proved invaluable earlier in the competition when he took a career-best 6-24 at Lord’s against Middlesex.
Murtagh struck the stumps and, in his excitement, ripped off his shirt and waved it round his head as he raced round the outfield in celebration. Maybe he just thought it would help his team-mates to see him in the gloaming.
Can this year’s quarter-final match that for tension and excitement?
