Two wins needed to make t20 last eight (From Worcester News)

Two wins needed to make t20 last eight

10:00am Tuesday 5th July 2011 in Daryl Mitchell

A PLACE in the quarter-finals of the Friends Life t20 is still very much in our own hands.

Yes, we lost two games over the weekend, but we go into the final three matches in the North group top four.

We face Nottinghamshire Outlaws tonight, who have run away with the group, and I think we need to win two more matches.

If you had said to me at the start of the competition that we would be in this position, I would have taken it.

We also face Warwickshire Bears on Friday night at New Road before finishing the group stages at Notts a week on Friday.

We have beaten the Bears at their place and hopefully we can do the same in the return match in front of what should be a big crowd.

Last week, we started with a win over Northamptonshire Steelbacks in Milton Keynes.

To be fair, Campbell Park is a much nicer place to play than Wantage Road.

As an outground, it was set up really well, the facilities there were excellent and the pitch was a really good one.

To restrict them to 129-9 was a really good effort and Aneesh Kapil’s four-over 3-9 was outstanding before being topped off by Saeed Ajmal’s triple-wicket maiden.

We stuttered a little bit at the start of our innings and needed a partnership between Vikram Solanki and I.

In any form of cricket you need partnerships — they are so important, especially when you are only batting for 20 overs.

Against Leicestershire Foxes last Friday, we were off the mark in all three disciplines.

We lost early wickets and needed some rebuilding work which we got from Gareth Andrew.

He had several good partnerships and managed to get us up to 130.

At Durham Dynamos on Sunday, we were a little sloppy in the field — there were a few misfields.

We have set our standards quite high this season in the field so we were disappointed to allow them 10 or 15 runs more than they should have had.

We began quite well with the bat and managed to get through the six-over power-play having lost only one wicket.

But then Paul Collingwood came on and bowled a really good spell, while Dale Benkenstein really put a stranglehold on us in those middle overs and the run-rate just kept creeping up.

However, the nature of t20 is we have the opportunity to put those defeats behind us quickly and we’re looking forward to the Nottinghamshire match at New Road tonight.

It’s a long bus journey home from Durham and there are usually a few newspapers, magazines and DVDs on the go.

Ben Scott was showing off a few card tricks on Sunday — he thought he was part of the Magic Circle!

But I managed to get Scotty to one side and he showed me a few of them so I’ll be using them soon!