Dillon Pennington was delighted to produce the form he has shown in red-ball cricket into the Vitality Blast and pick up the wicket of England Test captain Joe Root.
The Worcestershire Rapids paceman had astonishing figures of 4-0 from his opening two overs against Yorkshire Vikings at Headingley – including a treble wicket maiden.
It is a feat achieved on only a few occasions by the likes of Jordan Clark when playing for Lancashire in 2014 and Surrey’s Sam Curran four years ago.
Pennington had returned superb match figures of 9-76 in the LV=Insurance County Championship win over Derbyshire at New Road and just as deadly in his initial spell against the Vikings.
He said: “It was amazing. I’ve been nervous. I just wanted to get a performance in for the T20 side.
“Luckily, that opening spell summed up what I wanted to do.
“I just hit a consistent area; I don’t think I missed too many times, and that allowed to build pressure and Ben (Dwarshuis) was unbelievable the other end, and that combined into a pretty good powerplay for us.
“Getting out Joe Root, that was pretty cool. I’ve been looking forward to playing against him, and it was awesome just to bowl at, let alone to get him out.”
The Rapids eventually went down by 12 runs in a much-improved performance after the ten-wicket defeat on Tuesday evening against Notts Outlaws at Trent Bridge, with Riki Wessels hitting 77 and captain Ben Cox a T20 career-best 61 not out.
Pennington said: “It was one of those games on Tuesday, that is T20. It happens. You’ve just got to wipe the slate clean and go again.
“We are a bunch of guys who are striving to do our best at all moments, and Wednesday was a chance to put things right, and sadly we were just on the (wrong) end of the result.
“The last bit of the bowling was a real challenge, and Harry Brook and Jordan Thompson both played very well, but the batters did an unbelievable job to get so close.
“We gave it our best go, and it just didn’t work out for us.”
