Mick Newell has emphasised the Notts Outlaws’ desire to win for their home supporters ahead of tomorrow’s Royal London One-Day Cup fixture against Hampshire. 

Although a home quarter-final is already secure, Newell has played down talk of squad rotation and named an unchanged 12-man squad for the visit of James Vince’s side.

Notts began the campaign with six wins from six completed matches, all away from Trent Bridge, prior to last night’s five wicket defeat at home against the Kent Spitfires.

Newell’s men are now focused on bagging a morale-boosting victory at home ahead of next week’s last eight encounter.

“It was never going to be a case of winning every game,” the Director of Cricket said. “We’ve had a long winning run, mostly away from home sadly.

“We want to play well at Trent Bridge and hopefully we can put that right on Wednesday.

“It’s a very tough ask to win every 50 over game, but we’ve been on a terrific run of form and hopefully we can get back to that against Hampshire.

“We’ve payed some really good cricket. We’ve had some run-chases and we defended a score at Middlesex and have done really well.

“Losing to Kent is a disappointment but it’s not the end of the world. We’re going to top the group, we’re going to have a quarter-final and it’s going to be here at Trent Bridge.

“We don’t like losing, we’ve got to look at the game and see where we might improve for Wednesday.

“We’ve got to make sure we get the best team out every time we play if we can,” Newell continued. 

“Obviously the quarter-final is looming a week or so away and we’ve got to look at that and there are issues around this team we still need to rectify.

“We’ve been on a very, very good run of form and we’ve got to try and get back onto that quickly.”

Kent overhauled Notts’ total of 335 in county cricket’s return to Trent Bridge following a five week absence, meaning 675 runs had been scored in the match. According to Newell, it’s over to the bowlers to react.

“We saw some outstanding batting - it’s a sign of the way 50-over cricket is going at the moment,” he said.

“Some of the batting was of the highest quality and fair play to Kent, I thought they chased that score very well.

“We could have picked up another 15-20 runs at the end of our innings - having said that 335 should be enough and for the most part we seemed to have the game under reasonable control.

“106 were needed off the last ten but, all of a sudden three-or-four overs later, Kent were strong favourites. You’ve got to give Billings and Blake a lot of credit for that.

“There were two very contrasting hundreds from James Taylor and Sam Billings. James built his innings terrifically from number three. we know how good a player he is in that role. And to be fair to Billings, he did it at the end under the pressure of a chase.

“The batting is getting better-and-better, what has to be improved upon is the standard of bowling at the death.

“One or two of our overs at the end weren’t very good, batters don’t make mistakes at the back end and we disappeared.

“We need to be better in those overs and we need to look at the makeup of the people that are bowling those overs.”

 

Notts Outlaws squad to face Kent Spitfires (from): Jake Ball, Dan Christian, Luke Fletcher, Harry Gurney, Alex Hales, Brett Hutton, Steven Mullaney, Samit Patel, Chris Read, Brendan Taylor, James Taylor and Riki Wessels. 

 

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