Chris Adams has named a 13 man squad for the final home game in the CB40 game this season, the Tom Maynard memorial match against the Welsh Dragons tomorrow afternoon.
The game is being played in honour and in memory of Tom Maynard, who of course played for both of these sides before his untimely death in June of this year. A group of cyclists have set upon a ride this morning, including Tom’s dad Matthew, and will finish their trip shortly before the start of tomorrow’s game to raise money for the recently formed Tom Maynard Trust.
At 11 O’clock this morning, hundreds of people from around the cricketing world tweeted the following message to make people aware of the Trust: “Tom Maynard was a great man and a great cricketer. Support The Tom Maynard Trust and Bike Ride: http://bit.ly/MYao3s #tmt55.” The amount of people who conveyed this message showed how many lives Tom had an impact on, whether they knew him personally or not.
The squad once again contains Kevin Pietersen, who will be looking to do better than his golden duck at the weekend. Zander de Bruyn finally found some form after a string of low scores, to take us to a respectable score against Hampshire yesterday, so he will be looking to build on that and end the season on a high. Its fully understandable that Rory Hamilton-Brown has had a run of low scores recently, but he will be looking to get a score tomorrow that would make his best mate Tom proud.
Jason Roy has had a poor season in this competition, averaging just over 10, after being the leading run scorer last year. If Surrey are going to progress in this competition, then they need their key players to find some form and take them through to the Semi Finals. One of those key players is Steve Davies, who hasn’t been anywhere near his best this season in all forms of the game, but is currently Surrey’s leading run scorer across the 3 formats, which shows how poor the likes of de Bruyn have been.
Matthew Spriegel and Zafar Ansari are also two key players with both bat and ball, both playing very different innings with the bat yesterday, but equally effective. Having them as a spin option in the side is so vital, and Spriegel’s role of opening the bowling is really suited to him, and even though he doesn’t pick up bucket loads of wickets, he keeps it tight.
Murali Kartik has started to find some form, and alongside Gareth Batty, we have 4 quality spinners for this form of the game. Batty is 2 away from 50 wickets in all competitions this season, with Stuart Meaker one ahead of him on 49, and has so for several weeks now, as he has been away with the Lions.
We currently sit 4th in the table, 3 points behind Hampshire at the top, but we do have a game in hand on all 3 teams above us. The simple equation for us is that we must win our final two games of the group to have any realistic chance of qualifying for the Semi Finals, and that may not be enough. The best second place team looks like it will go to a team from Group C, so we have to beat Glamorgan and Somerset and hope Hampshire lose to Durham later this month.
Basically that means if we lose tomorrow, we are out of the competition. Good luck guys, and make Tom proud.
Surrey Squad:
Gareth Batty (C)
Rory Hamilton-Brown
Steve Davies (WK)
Kevin Pietersen
Jason Roy
Matthew Spriegel
Gary Wilson
Zander de Bruyn
Zafar Ansari
Murali Kartik
Stuart Meaker
Jon Lewis
Jade Dernbach
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