So, Surrey can be beaten in the Twenty20 Cup after all. Having scraped through the first semi, won the toss ahead of the final, put a highly-competitive 168 on the board and seen the back of Leicestershire’s danger-man Darren Maddy for 22, the Oval outfit must have thought they could not lose. But, if they did, they reckoned without the Foxes’ skipper Brad Hodge, who carried his side to victory with five balls to spare thanks to an unbeaten 77 in 53 deliveries.

Jeremy Snape weighed in with a crucial 34 off 16 balls, but Hodge has inflicted pain on Surrey before. In last season’s County Championship encounter at Grace Road he struck Mark Ramprakash at short-leg with a full-blooded pull. That put the former Middlesex man out of two of the Ovalites’ last three matches, all of which ended in humiliating defeats that wrote off their title hopes.

But the punishment Hodge meted out to Jonathan Batty’s men last night was the disappointment of what now looks certain to be only their second trophy-less season since 1995. The other was in 1998 when, coincidentally, Leicestershire snatched the championship title from under Surrey’s noses in the final round of matches. With the Foxes in Division Two in both league competitions, and likely to stay there, what more incentive can Surrey have for avoiding the drop this year?

Maddy, who entered the Finals Day as the leading scorer in the Twenty20 Cup helped put on 62 runs in six over for Leicestershire’s first wicket. At the other end Hodge raced to his half-century off only 25 balls, but then got bogged down until the 17th over.

Significantly, Adam Hollioake, for whom it seemed the Twenty20 had been invented, barely featured in either of Surrey’s matches. At one stage it appeared as if his accounting of Stevens and Sadler in the final would be telling, but when the Foxes needed 20 off the last two overs the 32-year-old all-rounder ran out of inspiration at the wrong time. Hollioake took three for 65 overall, yesterday, and made just 4 and 1 with the bat. His only consolation was that he finished this year’s competition as its leading wicket-taker.

Afterwards the former Surrey skipper said: “There’s no shame in losing, only shame in not trying your best and we certainly gave it our best. But when you've been in enough of those at the end you’re going to lose one the odd one. It was a great knock (by Hodge) and Jeremy Snape played well at the end as well. They played some great cricket to chase down a total we were pretty happy with.”

The current Ovalites’ captain, Jonathan Batty added: “With two overs remaining, I thought we were odds on to retain the title. The way that Hodge was batting, there was no stopping him. We knew their strength was the top in Hodge and Darren Maddy and if we knocked them over early we would have a big shout.”

Earlier, after coming through a nail-biting semi-final against Lancashire, in which Nayan Doshi opened the door for victory by dismissing Carl Hooper and Azhar Mahmood completed it with a superb final over, Alistair Brown made only the second half-century of his Twenty20 career. Once again, he chose the final in which to do so and yesterday it was worth 64 off 41 balls. But the rest of Surrey’s big hitters lost their way somewhat after Brown was caught at short third man off left-arm spinner Claude Henderson.

GO TO:

BACK TO: