Derbyshire cricket: Assessing the T20 season

Alex Hughes (in blue)

The feel-good factor is back in Derbyshire cricket.

After yesterday’s fine win at Leek, supporters seem quite chilled and mellow. The championship campaign may have had its challenges thus far, but we have only lost one from five one-day games. That two were rained off is neither here nor there – accentuate the positive, my friends.

There was a good look to that side yesterday, albeit aided by three batsmen hitting the ball like they were in the vintage form of high summer. If we could add that X-factor overseas player to the top of the order for the T20, there’s runs a-plenty in that top six.

Alex Hughes has fully earned the right to a place in that six, based on yesterday and a similar effort at Chesterfield last year. He currently averages 55 in List A cricket and, as well as timing the ball well, shows the benefit of intelligence to a cricketer with the way he works the ball around and into gaps. You don’t need to be built like Chesney (could be a follow up to Moves Like Jagger…) to score quickly and mini-me Hughes has his runs at a respectable 114 per hundred balls.

On another day the attack could be hit, but I think the continued form and fitness shown by Mark Footitt is worthy of mention and credit. A fast left arm bowler is awkward for anyone, but bowling round the wicket and firing it at your feet, a la Akram, he becomes an even more potent beast. As the likes of Malinga, Lee and Nannes have shown, fast bowlers take wickets in T20 and while I won’t suggest Mark Turner and Footitt are in that company (yet?), their pace will be an asset at the top and tail of innings.

We will miss Chesney Hughes’ bowling, but I would like to see us field at least two, maybe three spinners in the T20, with either David Wainwright or Tom Knight replacing one of the seamers. Alex Hughes gives you an option that, on certain tracks could be miserly, and I could see us being a decent T20 side.

There’s an old saying that you’re only as good as your last display. On that basis, Derbyshire are a pretty good side. There will be darker days ahead, but the way that they professionally and skilfully dismantled an Essex side that, on paper at least was their superior should give them confidence for the one-day part of the season.

So we await news of our T20 specialist, but I remain confident that news will break in the not too distant future and that we will have another exciting overseas talent to watch at the County Ground.

Watch this space my friends. And see you tomorrow for the Nottinghamshire preview.

PS Whenever I write or say that name, I always feel like thespians do when they refer to “The Scottish Play” instead of Macbeth.

Memo to self…must come up with an alternate name for them…