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Gloucestershire Gladiators v Kent Spitfires
13/06/2010
Friends Provident t20 South Division
At Gloucester
By Richard Latham
Gloucestershire suffered their second defeat at Archdeacon Meadow by 36 runs after Kent had posted their best ever Twenty20 score.
The Spitfires made the most of the short boundaries at the King's School to blast 217 all out after being invited to bat by Alex Gidman on a true pitch.
Rob Key (44), Joe Denly (48), Alex Blake (33) and Martin van Jaarsveld (26) all enjoyed the batsmen-friendly conditions and only Vikram Banerjee of the Gladiators bowlers managed an economy rate of less than ten an over.
Will Porterfield’s bright 43 gave Gloucestershire hope, but they collapsed from 62-1 to 94-6 as seamer Simon Cook took 3-22 and were eventually bowled out for 181, despite Chris Taylor’s fine 67 off 36 balls.
Gidman clearly foresaw a high-scoring game and understandably inserted Kent on winning the toss.
But the early bowling erred on the short side as the visitors were given the perfect start by Key and Denly, who plundered 65 off the six-over power play.
There were already 87 runs on the board in the ninth over when Key was bowled off stump attempting to pull James Franklin. The Spitfires skipper had hit 8 fours in facing 25 balls.
Denly lost nothing by comparison and had smacked 7 fours and a six when stumped advancing to drive the part-time off-spin of Abdul-Kadeer Ali.
By then it was 101-2 and Kent were going along at well over ten an over. The tempo was maintained by van Jaarsveld, but the most impressive big-hitting of the innings came from 21-year-old Blake, who twice profited from missed stumpings by Steve Snell off Kadeer and Jon Lewis.
The left-hander blasted 4 sixes in his 17-ball innings, one of them cut over point off Jon Lewis, before being yorked by Franklin.
At 168-5 in the 15th over, Kent looked set for an even bigger total. But a brilliant boundary catch by Hamish Marshall and a couple of run outs prevented them becoming the highest scorers in the competition this season.
Gloucestershire overcame the early loss of Franklin to score 58 from their power play overs as Porterfield and Alex Gidman suggested victory was possible.
But Cook then instigated a collapse and, although Taylor reached a half-century with two sixes in an over from Matt Coles, Kent always had things under control.
Ian Butler also used the long handle to good effect in his 28, but the Gladiators needed 86 off the last five overs and for all Taylor’s heroics in hitting 4 sixes and 6 fours, it proved too much.
The crowd was slightly down on the 2,700 who watched Friday night's defeat by Sussex Sharks and not as many as Gloucestershire had been hoping for.
So the return to King's School ended without a victory, but the small ground certainly encouraged some exciting hitting and plenty of runs in both games.
