If ever the phase "snatching victory from the jaws of defeat" applied to a game of one-day cricket, then Surrey's amazing win at Canterbury yesterday must surely be a contender. Kent, needing 37 with 32 balls remaining and with nine wickets in hand, on a belter of a pitch, not to mention with the advantage of a short boundary on one side, proceeded to lose four wickets in the space of eleven balls. Without such a collapse the Spitfires would have limped over the line. But, somehow, the makeshift Surrey attack held its nerve to claim victory from a match reduced to thirty overs per side due to heavy overnight rain.

That the Brown Caps were without five Test seamers, either due to injury or early season niggles, made the result all the more remarkable, if not totally unexpected. Neil Dexter and Darren Stevens had made the accumulation of runs look laughably easy, particularly with Nayan Doshi guilty of some unforgivable lapses in the field. Doshi did not fair much better with the ball, but thanks to the determination of Ian Salisbury and Jade Dernbach, any errors made on the part of the visitors were largely forgotten when the dust settled.

Needing to score at nearly seven and a half runs an over, Stevens got the Spitfires off to a stirring start by driving the first ball of Kent's reply straight down the ground for four, then taking two boundaries off Dernbach's opening over. But the introduction of Benning to the attack six overs later saw Dexter impose himself. The Kent openers went to their half-centuries in consecutive deliveries. Stevens reached his off the last ball of the fourteenth over, in 44 deliveries; a mark bettered by Dexter by three.

For Surrey, hope arrived in the shape of Ian Salisbury, who conceded just two off his first over. However, with Doshi being slog swept for two sixes in the very next over, the eighteenth, there appeared to be no way back for the visitors; not even when Stevens was adjudged leg before wicket. The former Leicestershire man looked a long way forward and was clearly unhappy to have been given out. But his departure looked unlikely to affect the eventual outcome.

Dexter progressed to 94 off 72 balls, before becoming Salisbury's next victim. But then Dernbach accounted for both Matt Walker and Martin van Jaarsveld before they could trouble the scorers and Salisbury had the Kent skipper, Robert Key, caught and bowled.

Earlier, other than off-spinner James Tredwell, who seems to have been around for ages despite being just 24 years of age, all of Kent's bowlers suffered at the hands of the Brown Caps, who kept the momentum going throughout thanks to Alistair Brown's 64 in 43 deliveries, which included a leg-side six off Kemp and a straight maximum off van Jaarsveld.

After James Benning went, trying to run the first ball of the third over down to third man, Jonathan Batty and Mark Butcher put on 96 in thirteen overs for the visitors' second wicket. As their alliance was beginning to take shape, Batty took three fours off one over from Robbie Joseph. In the eighth over Butcher brought up the fifty for Surrey by pulling and then slog-sweeping Simon Cook to the leg-side boundary.

Butcher, looking to drive, was caught behind off Simon Cusden's second legal delivery, but Brown raced to a 34-ball half-century, which, in the end, proved just as decisive.

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