Thursday, 19 June 2025

Derbyshire v Lancashire Vitality Blast game eight preview

I suspect - and hope - that Derbyshire make just the one change to the side that played so well last weekend against Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire.

Fynn Hudson-Prentice has returned to Sussex early from his loan spell, after the south coast side were hit by a raft of injuries. 

Fynn let no one down, as he never does, but logically he will be replaced by Zak Chappell, who is back in the squad and presumably restored to full fitness himself

The likely Derbyshire side: 

Jewell, Donald, Madsen, Patel, Whiteley, Guest, Andersson, Chappell, Aitchison, Ghazanfar, Brown (Lloyd and Thomson also in the squad)

If they opt for a used wicket, of course, Thomson or Lloyd may take the place of Ben Aitchison.

Lancashire have Saqib Mahmood in the squad for the first time this summer, but there is no Phil Salt, Joss Buttler or Jimmy Anderson in their squad. But with Luke Wood and Liam Livingstone there is plenty of international experience and the challenge is always to split the dangerous opening pairing of Keaton Jennings and Luke Wells.

Their squad:

Jennings, Wells, Bohannon,  Balderson, Blatherwick, Green, Hartley, Hurst, Jones, Livingstone, Mahmood, Sutton, Turner, Wells, Wood.

The weather forecast is set fair and there should be a large crowd in attendance. It will need a very good performance by Derbyshire, because the standard of opposition is higher than they faced last weekend. 

Can they win it? Yes, because as I have said before, if the entire team turns up, we are capable of beating anyone in this format. 

Will we? That's a different thing altogether. I cannot predict which Derbyshire side will turn up for this tournament, but the reality is that we cannot afford many more defeats if any possibility of progress is to be retained. All of our 'Get out of jail free' cards have been played in those first five games that we lost. 

Hopefully the Derbyshire that we saw last weekend is a permanent fixture for the rest of the competition. 

We might have a better idea of that tomorrow evening.

Postscript: I will be on North Derbyshire Radio again tomorrow night, talking about last weekend's performances and giving my thoughts on tomorrow's game. 

As usual, I will post a link to the interview to listen to over the weekend, should you wish.

6 comments:

  1. Tim, Chesterfield19 June 2025 at 19:39

    It's almost too warm to motivate myself to drive down to Derby after work tomorrow!

    ReplyDelete
  2. David exiled in Lancs19 June 2025 at 22:17

    I understand your comments about if the whole of the Derbyshire team play to their abilities then we can win, but the simple fact is that if Jennings, Wells, Livingstone, Wood and Mahmood play to their abilities then Lancashire will win. There is a gap between the levels of the two teams. Derbyshire can win, and I of course hope they do, but it will require Lancashire underperforming.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Got my mum a ticket for this one on the pretence that her hero Jimmy would be playing 😬😬

    She will have to find a new hero instead, hopefully Nye Donald after he scores a record quick century 😂

    ReplyDelete
  4. Chesterfield blue20 June 2025 at 19:23

    Why on earth have we put Lancashire into bat here, oh and the stream is really poor just like the bowling

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Think you have to credit the batters. They haven't allowed them to bowl. Batting second I guess they hoped to pace their reply, but they have been hammered here. The stream is suffering from lag and it appears the use of WiFi on the ground is throttling the bandwidth

      Delete
  5. This is an embarrassing poundshop version of the Taunton uber-debacle.

    Ah well, let’s concentrate on the league eh?

    ReplyDelete

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