Stats: Somerset create Twenty20 record despite losing the high-scoring thriller

Somerset made a valiant effort in the T20 Blast game on Thursday while chasing a huge target of 232 at the St Lawrence Ground in Canterbury against Kent. The home team batted first and posted 231/5 in their 20 overs that included six penalty runs as Somerset failed to complete overs in the given time period. The Kent skipper Sam Billings guided his team to their joint highest T20 total with an unbeaten knock of 57. They levelled their previous highest total of 231/7 that they made against Surrey in 2015.

Somerset lost an early wicket in the big chase but Steven Davies’s 25-ball 45 and Peter Trego’s 18-ball 30 kept the visitors in the hunt. James Hildreth and Corey Anderson added 42 runs in 16 deliveries to put their team on the driver’s seat at 133/3 after 12 overs. However, some cheap overs and the wickets of Hildreth and Anderson put the home side on top. The Somerset skipper Lewis Gregory walked in when his team needed 71 from only 21 balls.

Gregory yielded 20 runs from the 18th over with two fours and a six while the penultimate over also produced 21 runs as Adam Milne bowled two waist height full-tosses and got removed from the attack. The equation came down to 14 from the last five balls after the Somerset skipper scored a boundary on the first ball of the final over. Mitchell Claydon gave away only two runs from the next two deliveries while the 3rd umpire committed a blunder by not giving a boundary on the 4th ball costing two runs to Somerset.

Gregory could only take three runs on the penultimate delivery and finished with an unbeaten 15-ball 44 while Tom Abell could only pick a single on the final delivery when they needed seven. Davies and Hildreth’s 45 were top scorers in Somerset’s total of 226/5. Thus, they recorded the highest team total without an individual fifty in the Twenty20 format. In this process, they broke a 14-year-old record held by Surrey who made 221/8 against Sussex in 2004 where their highest was 46.

Australia also made 221/5 in a T20I game against England in 2007 where they had a highest individual score of 48. A total of 457 runs were scored in this game between Kent and Somerset which puts it in the top ten list of highest aggregated T20 matches. Billings’ 57* was the highest score during this run-feast while no other batsman crossed the 50-run mark in that game.

Highest team totals without an individual fifty in Twenty20 cricket:

(Stats as on August 18, 2018)

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