Middlesex First Team Coach, Richard Johnson, has named an unchanged squad of fifteen for Tuesday night’s Vitality Blast clash with Somerset, which will be played out in front of the live Sky Cricket cameras at Lord’s.
We head into tomorrow evening’s game off the back of an impressive victory down in Canterbury yesterday, where we successfully chased down the target set by Kent Spitfires to get our first points of this season’s campaign on the board.
The win came off the back of three straight losses at the start of the campaign, and it will give the playing group plenty of confidence ahead of two back-to-back home matches this week at Lord’s.
Yesterday against Kent, with ball in hand, we saw a much better bowling performance from the group, and despite a strong start from the Spitfires in the powerplay, in which they posted 78 for 2, some tight bowling spells from Ryan Higgins and Luke Hollman wrestled control back. Seven Middlesex overs from the medium pace and leg-spin duo went for just 41 runs, as the hosts were restricted to posting 173 for 8 in their allotted twenty overs.
With the bowling unit doing their job, we needed the same from the batting unit, and they certainly lived up to the task. Scores in the forties from Stephen Eskinazi and Ryan Higgins, and useful contributions from Leus du Plooy, Max Holden, Jack Davies and Luke Hollman, all who scored at a strike rate of over 143, got us over the line, as we reached the victory target in the final over of the innings.
It was a perfectly executed run chase, paced brilliantly, and was the first time this term that we’ve seen the Middlesex bowling and batting unit’s work in harmony. The result was a much better performance from Middlesex that delivered a comfortable win and showed just what the side are capable of.
Confidence will have been buoyed by such a strong all-round team performance, yet there was still plenty of room for improvement.
Against Somerset at Lord’s tomorrow, we’ll need to execute our plans just as efficiently, and more besides, as against an experienced white-ball outfit, we’ll need to be at our very best to build on Sunday’s victory.
Somerset come to Lord’s with a record of two wins and two losses from their opening four games to date, having beaten Essex by 4 wickets in their opening clash, and then being thumped by Surrey in round two by 57 runs. They lost out again in round three, going down by 4 wickets to Kent in Canterbury, before bouncing back in some style with a convincing win yesterday, when they smashed the Hampshire attack for 241 runs on their way to a 63-run victory, recording their third highest T20 score at their home ground.
In the runs to date for tomorrow’s visitors have been Tom Abell, with 167 runs, followed by white-ball specialist Will Smeed, with 143 runs, and Sean Dickson, with 129 runs - all at strike rates above 159.
The principal threat with the ball comes from Ben Green, who has already claimed 11 wickets in just four games this term, and he sits as the competitions leading wicket-taker to this point, whilst Lewis Gregory and Australia’s Riley Meredith have provided great support, with five wickets apiece.
Recent outings between the two sides have favoured the visitors, with Somerset winning each of the last three Blast clashes between the two sides since the Covid year of 2020.
Middlesex will be hoping to turn that run of results around tomorrow, and a performance like the one we saw on Sunday in Canterbury will give them every chance of doing so.
Middlesex’s fifteen-man squad for tomorrow’s live Sky game is as follows:
For those unable to attend Lord's and watch the game in person, the match will be shown live on Sky Sports Cricket, with the game starting at 6.15pm, and as a result of the game being shown live on Sky, we are unable to broadcast the match simultaneously as a live stream.
Middlesex
Somerset
