Last night at the Oval an amazing, tense, thrilling, once in a lifetime game ended with the Surrey Lions qualifying for the Twenty20 Cup finals day on the basis of a sudden death bowl-out. After the match had been controversially ruled a tie, Warwickshire and Surrey had to nominate five bowlers to bowl two balls apiece at a set of undefended stumps.

Twenty deliveries later it was still all square, which took, what was in effect extra time into sudden death. The Bears’ Dewald Pretoruis stepped up again and hit the stumps. Needing to do likewise simply to keep the Lions’ hopes alive, Azhar Mahmood hit them as well. But then Heath Streak, who had been successful with his second ball in the bowl-out, sent one past off-stump. Tim Murtagh, with the weight of Surrey’s hopes resting on in his shoulders finally came off a five-yard run and completed the job. Pandemonium ensued on and off the pitch as the ground erupted to the cheers of the 8,000-strong crowd.

Earlier, when Murtagh was stumped for four in Surrey’s 149-8, the Lions' skipper, Mark Ramprakash threw his bat down at the non-striker’s end in despair. But when, with darkness drawing in, Murtagh pushed back the middle stump to decide the match in the Ovalites’ favour the fact that the Lions had let themselves down with the bat was the furthest thing from everyone’s minds. Murtagh pulled off his shirt and set-off on a lap of the outfield. But was prevented when all of his team-mates, including the injured Mark Butcher, who was in his civvies, caught up with the 23-year-old down in front of the new OCS Stand.

Surrey coach Steve Rixon said afterwards: “I’m glad we got the job done and, fortunately, I think justice prevailed.” He went on to praise the togetherness his side displayed during what was cricket’s equivalent to the penalty shoot-out. He said: “The best part was how our guys reacted to each other, especially the ones that missed the stumps. They realised the pressure was on those guys and the support they got was as good as I’ve experienced in the two years I’ve been here. I think the emotion flowed over at the end, which you could have mistaken for a football match. At the end it was great to hear the Surrey crowd make some noise.”

But it all came after proceedings had at one stage looked as if they might end in an impasse. The bowl-out took place three quarters of an hour after Pretorius had pushed two runs to deep extra cover off the final ball. Surrey thought they had won, but so did Warwickshire, who believed they were about to receive six penalty runs due to the last over starting after the specified cut-off time of 8.16pm. The umpires got together with the scorers and the ECB’s Alan Fordham and it was announced that the match had, in fact, ended in a tie and that there would be a bowl-out.

After a lengthy discussion between the main protagonists took place out on the pitch, a Surrey spokesman made the following statement to the press: “The rules say that in the event of a tie there should be a bowl-out, and Warwickshire achieved a tie by making 117. Surrey refused initially to the bowl-out on the basis that it had been communicated to them that, with one ball remaining, if Warwickshire did not get 118 then Surrey would have won. That is how Surrey played it.

“After the ball had been bowled and the match was then ruled a tie, Surrey refused to take part in a bowl-out on the basis of what they had agreed with umpire Allan Jones prior to the last ball. Surrey would definitely have played it differently if they had known. Mark Ramprakash would not only have tried to stop the ball, which he let go knowing that the most Warwickshire could run was two, but he would also have set a different field.”

In what was normal time, saw a low-scoring affair, five overs of the Warwickshire innings were lost to rain, hence the Duckworth-Lewis calculation and hence the confusion at the end.

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