Lunch Report: Kent 259-5 (50 overs) v Somerset
Close of first innings of Friends Provident Trophy quarter-final (Kent won toss)
Thursday, 5 June 2008
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A brilliantly timed century – he reached it off the last ball of the innings – by Neil Dexter helped Kent set a challenging target for Somerset to chase.
On the way to his 113-ball hundred Dexter shared in a belligerent century stand for the second wicket with his captain Rob Key. The pair put on 104 runs in 20 overs and in conditions that were in marked contrast to those which had seen this tie postponed yesterday after water got under the covers at the St Lawrence Ground in Canterbury.
The heat appeared to be on Kent early on, as openers Key and Joe Denly found runs hard to come by against an accurate Somerset attack. Much of the credit for the economic bowling had to go to Charl Willoughby.
The left arm paceman was so difficult to score off that Somerset captain Justin Langer decided to bowl him straight through and the Kolpak signing finished by conceding just 24 runs off his allocation of ten overs.
Denly and Key had put on 68 for the first wicket before they were parted, the former being bowled by the third ball off Alfonso Thomas’s first over.
Thereafter Key and Dexter began to lay about them a little more effectively. Key, who hit a six and five 4s in his 73, looked imperious in his 88-ball stay, but when he perished caught behind off a thin edge, Dexter took charge and helped Kent into the realms of the challenging.
In all he hit three 6s and five 4s and left the Somerset bowling figures in tatters. Pick of the bunch for Somerset, after Willoughby, was Kent old boy Ben Phillips, who finished with 2-55.
When the decision was made yesterday to switch this Friends Provident quarter-final tie from Canterbury to Beckenham it meant that Kent had to call off a Second XI match against a combined Northamptonshire and Yorkshire side.
Frustratingly Kent Seconds were well on top at the time, having reduced the visitors to 119-9 – even more frustratingly for one Kent player, all nine wickets had fallen to one bowler, but poor Martin Saggers was left on the brink of claiming all ten in an innings for the first time in his career.
