James Hildreth sends Imran Qayyum into the orbit

The leather struck the meaty part of the willow and whistled out of the park at the speed of a gazelle.

Published - 17 Aug 2018, 13:31 IST | Updated - 17 Aug 2018, 13:31 IST

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James Hildreth is an experienced campaigner and has been plying his trade in the English domestic circuit for the last 15 years since July 2003. He can also whack the leather a country mile and has scored 3292 runs in 177 matches at a strike-rate of 123.15. The right-handed batsman showed some of his batting prowess for Somerset in their last T20 Blast encounter against Kent in Canterbury.

The 33-year-old has been in decent form in the ongoing tournament and has notched 336 runs in 14 contests at a strike-rate of 135.48. Yesterday night, he was required to pull off a herculean task and help his team track down a mammoth 232 runs. The Sam Billings-captained team is the table-topper and had the firepower in their armory to track down the monstrous total in Kent’s home-ground.

Hildreth picks the bone out of Qayyum

He came to bat with the score at 74/2 in 7.3 overs and despite their blistering start, the team was behind the original required rate of 11.60. He started cautiously and resorted to singles in order to get the measure of the conditions and the opposition bowling. However, he lost Steve Davies, who scored 45 runs, as his partner in the tenth over from left-arm spinner Imran Qayyum.

Nevertheless, the situation didn’t pull him into his shell. Rather, he decided to take the attack to the tweaker in the same over. In the fourth delivery of the tenth over, he swept Qayyum over mid-wicket for a gigantic six. The bowler missed his length by a fair margin and dished out a juicy full-bunger for the batsman to latch on. Hildreth cleared his left-leg in order to get leverage of his arms.

The leather struck the meaty part of the willow and whistled out of the park at the speed of a gazelle. Such was the ferocity of the stroke that the ball kept gaining height even when it crossed the venue and ended up hitting a house. He was dismissed by Mitchell Claydon for 45 runs. Somerset lost by five runs but remain at the top of the points table in the South Group with 20 points from ten matches.