Surrey squeeze home off last ball

TWENTY20 CUP, SOUTH DIVISION, The Oval:
Surrey 125-8 beat Hampshire 124-9 by one run. Surrey 2pts.

Surrey v Hampshire scorecard

Hampshire's Chris Benham was the game's top scorer at The Oval with 39.

Surrey held their nerve at The Oval as they defended 125-8 with victory off the last ball against Hampshire.

After smashing 186-1 in their opener to beat Middlesex on Monday night, Surrey had lost their second game to Sussex.

And it looked like three games in as many nights had taken their toll when Surrey could only set a small target.

But Hampshire's challenge floundered as they slumped from 90-3 to end on 124-9, teenager Hamza Riazuddin failing to hit a four off the final ball to win.

Hampshire needed 14 to win when the last over began and 19-year-old Londoner Riazuddin kept them in it by carving two boundaries from the first and fifth balls.

But, after a hurried conference with his skipper Usman Afzaal, Jade Dernbach bowled the final ball full and straight and , although Riazuddin drove towards the cover boundary, James Benning made sure of the stop and two runs were not enough.

Another player at the heart of Surrey's tigerish display in the field was Chris Schofield, the leg-spinning all-rounder who was in England's inaugural World Twenty20 squad in South Africa in September 2007.

Schofield may have only scored 11 runs but he took the vital wicket of Chris Benham, who had earlier swept him for two sixes over mid-wicket in a top score of 39 from 37 balls.

And he also pulled off two magnificent direct hit run-outs of Jimmy Adams and Nic Pothas to further undermine Hampshire's chase.

But It was no surprise, on Champions League final night, that the early staging of this year's Twenty20 saw only 5,000 turn up on cold, gloomy evening that always carried the threat of rain.

Hampshire manager Giles White told BBC Radio Solent:

"It was a low-scoring game and an exciting game because we were one run away but we probably shouldn't have been in that situation.

"We lost wickets at the wrong times and if we had batted better we would have probably got over the line.

"It's disappointing because we played some good cricket, but if we are going to lose games then Twenty20 is such a format that you are going to get tight finishes and you are going to come out on the wrong side of a couple."