DARYL MITCHELL COLUMN

WE play Glamorgan at New Road in the Friends Life t20 on Friday night and it will be our first game with them in this year’s competition after the SWALEC Stadium clash was postponed following the tragic death of Tom Maynard.

What happened is very difficult to compare to anything I’ve been through and it is hard to imagine what would happen if it had been one of our lads involved.

It is an extremely sad time for everyone in the cricket world and my thoughts are with Tom’s family and friends at both Surrey and Glamorgan.

I didn’t know Tom that well, but I’d chatted with him a few times and he was a likeable guy, who was a fantastic talent which he showed with a fine hundred against us at New Road recently.

It is a great loss for Surrey and probably for England as he looked set to play international cricket in the near future.

No twenty20 game is ever easy as a special performance from one individual can win a match on its own but, if we can perform like we did against Northamptonshire on Saturday, there is a good chance we could win the game.

Glamorgan have two quality Australian batsmen in Marcus North and Shaun Marsh who will be a force to be reckoned with.

Jim Allenby has been in good form recently and obviously Simon Jones will be keen to bowl fast and do well against his old team-mates.

We have only played four games so far in this year’s FL t20 and are looking forward to the next six.

Hopefully, we can win on Friday and get on a bit of a run to claim one of the two automatic qualification places.

Sohail Tanvir should be with us for Friday’s game and he will be available for our last six group games.

He has been in great form with the ball for Pakistan and should bowl well for us both at the top of the order and at the death.

He is also capable of some big hitting down the order, which will give us another batsman alongside Gareth Andrew who can clear the ropes later in our innings. Against Warwickshire last Friday, it was a difficult pitch to post a total on and the decision to bat first was probably the wrong one.

We were probably 20 runs short of a competitive total, so it was difficult to keep the pressure on the Warwickshire batsmen and Varun Chopra played well to see them home.

It is disappointing to lose any game, particularly if they are derby matches.

We beat them twice in the t20 competition last year and it was a shame we couldn’t keep that run going.

However, it was important to bounce straight back to winning ways and we did that on Saturday at Northants.

Jimmy Cameron was excellent and his partnership with Phil Hughes was slow to get going, but they hung in there and allowed us to post a decent total.

I thought we were probably 10 to 15 runs short, but we bowled fantastically and only needed to use five bowlers as they all got through their four overs, while we were really sharp in the field too.