Lancashire adds Chris Green to T20 Blast squad

After Australian off-spinner Nathan Lyon's stint in England was cut short to only seven County Championship matches with the seasoned campaigner having to miss out on the remainder of the tournament as well as the entirety of the T20 Blast, with Cricket Australia wanting to preserve him for the series Down Under when India tour Australia in November later this year, Lancashire roped in Chris Green, another Australian, to fill the void.

Although making only a singular T20I appearance for Australia which came against India in the fourth T20I of the five-match T20I series in which he couldn't quite make a substantial impact, he has a wealth of T20 experience ingrained in him, with the bowling all-rounder playing 200 T20s, representing many a franchise in T20 leagues all over the globe. He has played in leagues such as the Caribbean Premier League, the Big Bash League, and the Pakistan Super League, to name a few. 

He has some impressive numbers to back himself, grabbing 164 wickets in 200 games at an astonishingly remarkable economy of only 7.03, coupled with scoring 1285 runs in the 129 innings he's had the opportunity to express himself with the bat. His rise to prominence came when he was seen to be a handy resource with the new ball, and has since grown more and more adept at mastering that particular skill.

Lancashire's Director of Cricket Performance, Mark Chilton, said that after Cricket Australia made Nathan Lyon back out of the white-ball format, he, along with Lancashire's head coach, Dale Benkenstein, were intent on bringing in an overseas replacement who would be at their disposal for both the group-stage blocks of the tournament, which they believed would play an essential role to ensure a seamless transition and maintaining some sort of coherence as well as fluidity within the structure.

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Not only due to Green being fully available for Lancashire, but his all-round expertise was what drew Chilton to bring him in, with some factors being his potency of bowling across phases in a 20-over game, his explosive nature with the willow during the death, and the experience he'd gained leading the Sydney Thunder in the BBL last year (which would in turn be beneficial for the youngsters in the Lancashire setup), being the fundamental ones.

Green was seemingly overjoyed to join Lancashire for the upcoming tournament and was eagerly excited to meet his new teammates and what all of them could achieve holistically. Having previously played in the T20 Blast before, representing Birmingham Bears in 2019 and Middlesex in 2021, Green was enthusiastic to making the Emirates Old Trafford his seasonal home for the first time.