Just back home at 11.30 after a thrilling fireworks finale to the Queen's birthday party at Hever castle - to find a quite splendid and slightly unexpected Sussex victory.
Quite hilarious to read some of the comments made in this thread in the course of the game slagging off Sussex for their crapness - although not quite as funny as Kent's most prolific blogger who files his one-eyed ball-by-ball ringside nonsense ("that looked plumb lbw from our position at mid-wicket") on both the Kent supporters facebook page and the We Are Kent website and confidently informed the world that Will Beer is an off-spinner...
Half a dozen random observations from afar, based purely on the scorecard:
1. How pleasing for once that the greatest reward was reaped by the quickest three bowlers in the match - Mills, Jordan and Coles - rather than the boring 'pace-off' which has become the negative conformity of English T20. Credit to Andy McKay for the wicket? Can't say as I wasn't there.
2. Well played Ross Taylor, particularly for taking on Tredwell. I've always felt Tredders is predictable enough to be very hittable. Canny bowler, for sure. But far too many sides treat him with exaggerated respect, allow him to bowl at them and push him for singles when, with a little more ambition, he can besent sailing out of the ground.
3. Why did Sussex's most economical bowler (Shahzad) only bowl two overs ? Was he injured?
4. Do we need Briggs when we've got Beer? His two overs for 23 tonight suggested he's a luxury as the sixth bowler and makes it even more inexplicable why Beer was dropped but Briggs retained in the previous game. Deeply unimpressed by this signing, I regret to say. His 4-197 in white ball cricket isn't much better than his 3-306 in red ball cricket and you can see why Hants were happy to release him from his contract a year early.
5. Batting is still misfiring. But when the bowlers do their job, in the shortest form of the game it only needs one batsman to stick around for 13-14 opvers and contribute a top-class knock and you're virtually home.
6. Wasn't there and perhaps those who were will tell me this was a thrilling match with the highest skill levels on display. But my instinct tells me this might be the sort of game Colin Graves had in mind when he bemoaned the 'mediocrity' of our domestic T20 competition compared to the IPL and Big Bash?
Anyway, the table tonight makes satisfying reading for Sussex, with three wins from four games. At the start of the season I fancied Kent for finals day and gave Sussex little chance - but it now looks totally the other way around. With three defeats in five games, Kent are going to find it very hard to progress and will need a least five and probably six wins from their remaining nine games. Sussex, by contrast, probably need four or at most five wins from their ten remaining games to book a q/f place...
