Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Spinner’s ‘special moment’ rare highlight for Spitfires
A youthful Kent Spitfires side could not avoid a 57-run loss at home to Essex in their rainhit Royal London One-day Cup swansong on Wednesday night.
Having already been assured of bottom place in South Group, Kent gave domestic List A debuts to Zak Crawley and Imran Qayyum with senior players including Darren Stevens and Matt Coles rested.
Spinner Qayyum, who turned 24 on Tuesday, bagged 2-79 including the prized scalp of former England Test captain Alastair Cook in his first over.
Qayyum said: “That was special. To get England’s greatest Test batsman with my fifth ball felt pretty good. I went for a few more runs than I wanted to thereafter but that’s a wicket I’ll always remember.”
Essex landed their seventh win in eight starts to reach the semifinals following a triumph on the Duckworth-lewis method after the rain came 11 overs into Kent’s reply.
In pursuit of the visitors’ 307-6, the hosts had slumped to 50-3 when the rain arrived ended proceedings and inflict a seventh defeat upon the Spitfires.
Kent opened their reply with Daniel Bell-drummond and Crawley, who was making his first-team debut but in attempting to force the pace, the former Tonbridge School pupil clipped Jamie Porter to Varun Chopra at deep square leg.
Kent skipper Sam Northeast was then bowled by Ashar Zaidi who trapped Sean Dickson leg before in his next over, bringing in Alex Blake, who hit three quick boundaries before the rain.
Ex-england skipper Cook contributed 54 to an opening stand of 95 with Chopra before he cut the fifth ball of Qayyum’s first over, only to edge into the gloves of Adam Rouse.
Chopra (83) chopped on when also aiming a late cut against Qayyum but the runs continued to come through Tom Westley (35), Dan Lawrence (32) and Ravi Bopara, who fell one short of a half-century.