A full round-up of everything that happened between Surrey and Nottinghamshire in the Royal London Cup match at Guildford on Tuesday.
WHAT HAPPENED
Ryan Patel’s astonishing 70-ball 131 with 10 sixes and seven fours, plus Jamie Smith’s 16-ball fifty, gave a 3,000-strong Guildford crowd some remarkable entertainment as Surrey beat Nottinghamshire by 33 runs (DLS) in a heavy-scoring Royal London Cup game that had earlier looked to be falling foul of heavy rain.
In a contest reduced to 30 overs per side, Surrey smashed 23 sixes and 12 fours in their 311 for 8 – a remarkable total considering that they had only scored 29 for the loss of Hashim Amla in eight overs when bad weather prevented any play from 11.37am until 2.45pm.
After the restart, Surrey took full advantage of Woodbridge Road’s short boundaries to hammer 282 in the 22 overs that then remained. In reply, needing 300 – bewilderingly, fewer than Surrey under the Duckworth Lewis Stern system – Notts made a spirited 266 for 7 with eight sixes of their own.
Sol Budinger’s 21-ball 45 up front promised a strong chase, particularly when the left-hander took 30 from Gus Atkinson’s second over, the third of the innings, when two no balls helped him to plunder five fours and a six.
Ben Slater’s 69 off 48 balls also threatened but Peter Trego and Haseeb Hameed fell cheaply and Matt Dunn’s double-wicket maiden, when he dismissed Matthew Montgomery for 29 and Liam Patterson-White for a duck, left Notts 151 for five after 17 overs and falling too far behind the asking rate. There were some more defiant blows from Joey Evison (54) and Dane Schadendorf (44 not out) but Surrey’s bowlers were always disciplined enough.
Patel’s career-best white-ball score came in just the 23-year-old’s fifth List A appearance and, replacing Amla when the South African tickled a legside catch behind to go for 14 at the start of the sixth over, he and opener Mark Stoneman tore into the Notts bowling in a second-wicket stand eventually worth 152 in 16 overs.
The real carnage effectively began when Patel hit Montgomery’s off spin for six from the last ball of the 14th over. That stroke kick-started a memorable assault in which there were three successive Patel sixes in Montgomery’s next over, the 16th, a six each for Patel and Stoneman in a Trego over costing 19 and then another three sixes in a row from Patel against Evison’s medium pace.
Those blows, in the 21st over, took Patel to 99 and the left-hander completed a 59-ball hundred from the next delivery and added one final six off left-arm spinner Patterson-White before holing out to deep mid wicket one ball later. Patel certainly loves Guildford: in 2018 his medium-paced swing brought him a freakish 6 for 5 on this ground in a championship fixture against Somerset.
Stoneman was hit on the boot to be leg-before to Brett Hutton for a 48-ball 43, and Tim David fell for 13, skying a catch after swinging Dane Paterson for a powerful six that brought up Surrey’s 200 earlier in that 24th over.
After Patel’s dismissal, though, Smith merely stamped harder on the accelerator just when it seemed as if Surrey’s scoring rate simply could not go higher. There were sixes over long off and long on against Luke Fletcher, three in succession off Patterson-White – the first two into the road over mid wicket and the last straight over the pavilion – and a final straight six, his sixth, off Paterson in a 19-ball 54.
Rikki Clarke and Atkinson, too, both hit two sixes in the last couple of overs as Notts finished punch-drunk and spectators knew they had witnessed something special. It is not just the Hundred, or the Vitality Blast indeed, which can serve up an explosion of power hitting.
POST-MATCH REACTION
Hearing from the man of the moment!
@backandacross pic.twitter.com/lr5WeZgGsI
— Surrey Cricket (@surreycricket) July 27, 2021
TEAM LINEUPS
Surrey XI: Amla, Stoneman, Patel, Smith, Clarke, Reifer, David, Atkinson, McKerr, Dunn, Moriarty
Nottinghamshire XI: Slater, Budinger, Trego, Hameed, Montgomery, Evison, Patterson-White, Schadendorf, Hutton, Fletcher, Paterson
UP NEXT
Our next match at The Kia Oval is the visit of Northamptonshire on Friday 30th July. Tickets are available to purchase here.
