Roy targets 100 in Twenty20 clash
ONLY two men have ever scored a Twenty20 hundred for England but after hitting form in India, Jason Roy has set his sights on joining the club.
Alex Hales was the first man to reach the three-figure milestone, making a thrilling 116 not out in a World Cup clash against Sri Lanka in 2014, but there has been only one further century in the seven years that followed.
That was scored by Dawid Malan against New Zealand in 2019, with the Yorkshire batsman also finishing unbeaten on 99 against South Africa in December.
Their current opponents India, by contrast, boast seven hundreds including four from the bat of Rohit Sharma and two by KL Rahul.
Roy has top-scored for the tourists in their first two matches in Ahmedabad, 49 in a winning cause followed by 46 in a losing one, but hopes to take his scoring to the next level with three games to go.
His current best sits at 78 but he knows exactly what it takes to go on, scoring four tons in domestic T20s and another nine in England’s allconquering 50-over side.
“Those forties are great and look good on the scoreboard but for a team to get 180s, 190s and very competitive totals in T20, you need someone to go on and get a big score,” he said ahead of Tuesday’s clash at the Narendra Modi Stadium.
“I’d say it’s been a bit of a stopstart T20 international career for me, really. I haven’t quite got going properly with those big scores, there’s been no hundreds, so that’s my target.
“To score a hundred in the T20 format, you have to be ultra-aggressive. You’re looking at facing a maximum of 60 balls, really: start in sixth gear up to the sixth over, then go down the gears and then back up again. It’s a mixture of aggression and pretty calculated stuff if you want to get those big scores.”
Roy heads into the third match of the series just 15 runs away from reaching 1,000 in the format, and could become the fifth man to do so after Eoin Morgan, Hales, Kevin Pietersen and Jos Buttler.
He has a higher strike-rate than all of those – a bruising 143.79 – and his relentless willingness to take on attacks with high-risk strokes means he often ends up sacrificing himself for the cause before posting a landmark score.
“My mindset is to go out there, get the best possible start for the team and put aside what I might be feeling,” he said. “My job is to not mess about, really.”
Roy’s recent returns spell good news for England as they plan towards this winter’s T20 World Cup, after he laboured through a lean patch in 2020.
He admitted feeling a certain disconnect with his game during the pandemic but credits a stint in Australia’s Big Bash League with rekindling the spark.
The opener scored 355 runs in 12 matches for runners-up Perth Scorchers, with two half-centuries.
“I never stopped loving the game, but I think the whole year that has just gone – no crowds being around, everything that is going on that is so much bigger than the game – just puts loads of stuff in perspective,” he said.
“I needed to play in the Big Bash... the moment I got there the first game I had 20 odd people watching me in the nets and I had a sense of an adrenalin rush and belonging again. It was the most incredible feeling. Playing in front of crowds makes you realise that they mean a huge amount to us as sportsmen.”
OF all Sunderland’s appearances at Wembley, this was unquestionably the strangest.
Wembley Way stood windswept and deserted.
The handful of fans in red and white who made the pilgrimage left outside unable even to look in.
The national anthem sung via the big screen to 90,000 empty seats.
The contrast with Sunderland’s last eight appearances at Wembley the FA Cup final in 1992, League Cup finals in 2014 and 1985, play-off finals in 1990, 1998 and 2019, the EFL Trophy final in 2019 and even the Football League Centenary tournament jamboree in 1988, when thousands of supporters descended on the capital could not be more stark.
Yet there was one more big difference yesterday.
All those appearances at Wembley since the club’s famous FA Cup triumph against Leeds United in 1973 had ended in defeat.
This time, when the trophy was hoisted into the sky at full-time it was bedecked in red and white ribbons.
The trophy lift was performed not in front jubilant Sunderland supporters but instead for the TV cameras to relay to those back home and across Wearside it was greeted with a mixture of joy and relief. Of course, it was not the way any Sunderland fan had dreamed of the moment their 48-year wait for silverware would come to an end.
Yet when you have waited almost half a century for your team to win at Wembley, it would be churlish to pick holes..
The EFL Trophy does not rank alongside English football’s three major domestic honours but it is a trophy nonetheless.
Better to have it in the trophy cabinet and argue about its importance than leave the cabinet empty as a monument to serial failure.
Sunderland’s victory against League Two Tranmere Rovers was hardly a classic final.
The Black Cats did not save one of their best performances for the big occasion and for long spells Tranmere presented a real threat, Luke O’Nien again excelling at centre-back while goalkeeper Lee Burge made two important saves on his way to another clean sheet.
It was also a big day for 35-yearold Grant Leadbitter, who returned from a dislocated shoulder to help his boyhood club win a trophy, and for Max Power, who wore the captain’s armband and lifted the cup in a final which pitted him against the club he joined as an eight-year-old.
The game was won by one ‘magic moment,’ as boss Lee Johnson - the man who had broken the chain of 27 trophyless managers between himself and Bob Stokoe - described it.
Aiden McGeady threaded an eyeof-a-needle pass through the Tranmere back line, releasing Lynden Gooch who kept his head to finish.
It was fitting the winning goal should be scored by an academy graduate, a 25-year-old Californian who travelled to England to train with the club in the school holidays from the age of ten and who later made Wearside his home and went on to represent the USA.
Gooch has experienced the lows of back-to-back relegations with Sunderland and the pain of two Wembley defeats in as many months two seasons ago when the Black Cats came up short in the EFL Trophy and then in the play-off final.
Now he has joined 1973 legend Ian Porterfield and 1937 FA Cup heroes Bobby Gurney, Raich Carter, and Eddie Burbanks in the most exclusive club of all - men who have scored in Sunderland Wembley wins.
Among the lucky few to witness this triumph was Sunderland’s new owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, who has been in charge less than four weeks.
Winning this trophy represents the perfect launchpad for the LouisDreyfus era and also for that of head coach Johnson, who is also a relative newcomer having taken over just three months ago.
If this was the launchpad, achieving promotion would represent liftoff.