2017 Twenty20 Finals Day – most of the story in scorecards

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Notts win T20 Blast (via ECB)

We rather love Twenty20 finals day, which has always seemed to strike a good balance between elite sport and village fete.

A lot of short format competitions seem to be striving for the po-faced tribalism of football, but the annual climax of the original has always erred on the side of fun. It’s a day-long festival centred on cricket. There are worse things in the world. Like AIDS.

You probably didn’t need an example.

We only managed to follow this year’s edition via the intermittent checking of scorecards. In a world of video clips, Twitter and live blogs, it was a refreshing experience. There’s something to be said for telling the story to yourself based wholly on a bunch of numbers.

We see Samit Patel did well, which is never a bad thing, and so did Steven Mullaney. We’re afraid that no matter what he does in his career, the latter will always be the guy whose mum’s his biggest supporter.

We’re also aware that the Natwest lady jammed her angular trophy into Dan Christian’s eye at the post-match presentation.

The one thing we couldn’t find was a scorecard for the mascots race, so if someone could fill us in on how that one played out, we’d really appreciate it.

DON'T BE LIKE GATT!

Mike Gatting wasn't receiving the King Cricket email when he dropped that ludicrously easy chance against India in 1993.

Coincidence?

Why risk it when it's so easy to sign up?

11 comments

  1. With regard to the mascot race. A former colleague of mine, who attended, posted on Facebook that ‘Lanky was awful’. That’s all I know

    1. We were actually quite looking forward to piecing together a garbled whole from assorted random fragments, such as AP Webster’s above.

      If there’s one thing better than watching a mascot race, it’s crowd-sourcing a mascot race report from a bunch of people who weren’t really paying attention and several of whom were half-cut.

  2. I went for the first time this year. Part of me loved the carnival atmosphere and the high quality cricket and the exuberant fun. Part of me hated it as large sections of the crowd were more interested in singing “don’t take me home” and “Sweet Caroline” and getting royally hammered – the cricket seemed a byproduct for them.But perhaps this is no bad thing, cricket needs attention more than ever before. It just feels at times like the cricket is happening and a large proportion of the crowd couldn’t care less, which is a shame as there was some excellent stuff played, Samit’s innings was an absolute gem as was Gurney’s bowling. Overall I think I enjoyed it.

    1. Broadly speaking, Twenty20 crowds can be Sunday afternoon families or Friday night lads getting on it early. Not particularly a fan of them mixing.

  3. I was a little disappointed that you meant the “Natwest lady jamming her angular trophy into Dan Christian” quite literally.

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