Wednesday, July 19th, 2017

Daryl Takes Over From Moeen As County’s Leading T20 Scorer

Daryl Mitchell has clocked up his second significant milestone of the season in becoming Worcestershire’s leading run-scorer in T20 cricket.

Mitchell became only the 25th player to score 10,000 first class runs for the County earlier in the campaign.

Now he has surpassed Moeen Ali as their top run-getter in the shortest format of the game in which he started out primarily as a bowler who could bat a little and now opens as in red ball cricket.

But at the forefront of Mitchell’s mind is helping the Rapids to bounce back from successive home defeats against Birmingham Bears and Leicestershire Foxes in the NatWest T20 Blast.

They take on Derbyshire Falcons at New Road this evening and then have another home game against Lancashire Lightning on Friday evening.

Mitchell said: “I didn’t know about (the T20 record). To be delighted about it, you’ve got to know about it first of all! Obviously it’s nice.

“I came into the team at the right time when T20 was just kicking off.

“I started off as a bowler who probably batted a bit, probably a similarl role to what Barny (Ed Barnard) and George Rhodes are playing now, when I first started.

“I came in as a youngster, decent in the field, bowled a few overs here and there and batted down the order.

“I worked my way up as time went on and scored some runs. I’ve open the batting for the last three or four years since Vikram left.

“Mo playing for England regularly also helped me to move up the order. It’s nice to be on top, I guess.

“Mo and Vik scored a lot of runs in T20 when it first kicked off. Two very good players and, if still playing T20 regularly, would have scored a lot more runs than I have. But it’s nice to just nick past them.”

Mitchell says the Rapids are looking to improve on their performance in the opening two matches.

He said: “It’s been a disappointing start, losing the first two games. In previous years, particularly last year, we’ve started very strongly and tailed off.

“Hopefully this year we can do it the other way.

“We’ve started poorly but hopefully we can gradually build up and get ourselves into a quarter-final.”

WORCESTERSHIRE T20 LEADING SCORERS

1921 Daryl Mitchell

1890 Moeen Ali

1472 Vikram Solanki

1201 Graeme Hick

935 Alexei Kervezee

915 Tom Kohler-Cadmore

879 Stephen Moore

874 Ross Whiteley

866 Ben Smith

767 Ben Cox

615 Gareth Andrew

556 Brett D’Oliveira

547 James Cameron

514 Colin Munro