Inside Sussex's white-ball juggernaut

NICK FRIEND: Ahead of the T20 Blast, The Cricketer was invited to Hove to watch Sussex's much-vaunted white-ball squad in training as they prepare for their latest quest to regain the title they last won in 2009

Sussex's red-ball squad have just finished training and are primed for their trip to Leicestershire, so for most the day is over. But at the back of the ground at Hove, the outdoor nets adjacent to the indoor school are gradually filling.

T20 Blast season is almost upon us, and Sussex are a fascinating case: perennially in the mix but without a trophy to show since 2009. Two of the men involved then are still on the field now – Luke Wright and Will Beer – and another, Michael Yardy, is back at the club as its academy director.

All three are on site: Yardy is throwing balls at Jofra Archer, indulging in a quite remarkable session. He bats for close to an hour – perhaps longer – and plays every shot in the book, and several others besides. Grant Flower, the county's batting coach, is the other bowler, slinging balls down with a side-arm and watching them fired back at him with interest. From a television screen and the sofa, it's easy to forget quite how much power exists in the levers of today's big-hitters.

Until the desperately unfortunate news a week later that he had suffered a season-ending stress fracture, Archer had long been targeting a return to action in time for Sussex's T20 campaign, for which he was named as part of a leadership group.

The other members of that ensemble are in the next net along: Ravi Bopara is the new captain, with George Garton as his deputy – a role designed to give the 25-year-old a growing sense of responsibility; Tymal Mills isn't training today, having only just flown back from the Indian Premier League with a minor heel injury. He has been on the ground, nonetheless; there are promotional headshots to complete and a sense of community among this condensed group of limited-over specialists.

Wright, Beer, Bopara and Mills only play white-ball cricket these days. Archer is centrally contracted, and Garton is on the comeback trail following a bout of long Covid. Like Mills, he isn't taking an active role in this session but has come along anyway, and it is a marker of his comfort in this new role that he sticks around afterwards for a detailed technical chat with a young academy batter.

Earlier, Bopara terrorised the same youngster as he worked on a new delivery. "Hit it for six," he calls out from the top of his run-up. "One ball, six to win." They repeat the process 10 times, and Bopara isn't going anywhere until he's sensed progress. At 37 years of age – and with 411 T20 appearances to his name – he continues to learn.

^{The Cricketer was invited to Hove to watch Sussex's white-ball squad in action}

For two hours, that's the hallmark of this rare opportunity to see the country's biggest mini-squad of white-ball-only cricketers up close and personal.

"You don't have to do much," says James Kirtley, the man in charge of Sussex's T20 outfit. He's talking about his own role as a first-time head coach, tasked with managing a side that has all the knowhow and autonomy to look after itself.

"A lot of it is organisation: you're making sure that the structure around the practice is good. You provide the environment, you provide the facilities, and they tend to get on with it themselves."

What you also hear, though, is "quality conversation": uncertainty that you might not expect to hear from Bopara, whose career appearance tally is bettered worldwide only by Kieron Pollard, Dwayne Bravo, Shoaib Malik and Chris Gayle.

"All the time, they're saying: 'What do you think? How do you think about this? Did you see this bit of cricket? What happens if I come round the wicket here? Did you see me coming?' It's about looking to get better, and the responses are honest. No one tries to give fluffy answers back. It's all about performance. 'If I come round the wicket and I deliver this, is it going to make a difference?' 'Yes, it is – you're going to expose yourself to this area on the pitch.'"

At one juncture, Bopara turns to Kirtley and asks why he's always struggled for consistency from around the wicket. It's easily forgotten in this environment that Kirtley was once Sussex's white-ball king, the hero of the county's C&G Trophy final in 2006. Bopara takes his advice onboard about straightening his line and returns to bowling.

"They know their games," says Kirtley, "but it's their awareness of how to get better."

Wright was the captain until mid-March, stepping down after 104 games at the helm. No one in the history of English domestic T20 cricket has scored more runs, and there are few things that Sussex's experienced core haven't seen previously in the sport's shortest format. So, captaincy was by committee at times – a collaboration between some of the format's sharpest minds – and Wright's role, by his own admission, was closer to crowd control.

"We had so many good players when we had everyone available; it was about juggling things with so many comings and goings, but also managing expectations. Everyone wants to bowl from the best end, but someone has to bowl the tough overs at tough times, and they might not always get the role that they want because there is so much quality."

^{Will Beer (left) was part of the Sussex team that won the Blast in 2009 (Julian Finney/Getty Images)}

Mills points to the way in which Wright looked after Archie Lenham, who made his debut in the Blast at 16 in 2021; he was born a year after Bopara first played in the Twenty20 Cup. At Hove, Wright had him bowling downhill – the safer end for any leggie, let alone a child too young for the squad WhatsApp. It meant Beer taking on the greater challenge. "It was just to make sure that something that could be a daunting experience is slightly less daunting," says Mills.

"They can thrive in that setup because they're not expected to carry the heavy load. There's a lot of responsibility on us as senior players to perform, and it's a responsibility that we don't shy away from."

Lenham wasn't the only youngster to come through the ranks last season, nor is he the first to establish himself in Sussex's senior setup via the Blast.

Wright's brother, Ashley, is now on the senior coaching staff and is present on this overcast Tuesday, slinging balls through the session. But when Phil Salt was a teenager, he was coaching on the pathway and recommended the credentials of a fearless, top-order prospect. Salt didn't pass 33 in his first Blast season but became Wright's opening partner in 2018, just after the departure of Chris Nash. They persisted, and now he's an international cricketer and regular franchise pick, albeit now at Lancashire.

"His job was just to get us off to a flier," says Wright. "On the way, we wanted to shape him, and with how hard he's worked, he has turned into the player he is now. He was a massive win for us."

Harrison Ward, 22, featured at Finals Day last autumn and has begun this season in quite violent fashion for Oxfordshire. He is also netting, adding a left-hander and a touch of youth to proceedings. So, too, is Jordan Shaw, a 26-year-old seamer who's been around the setup for some time. With none of Mills, Archer or Garton bowling, he is doing the donkey work off the long run.

There were games for Ollie Carter and Henry Crocombe, both 20, last summer as well. Dan Ibrahim, the 17-year-old who holds the record as the youngest scorer of a County Championship half century, is yet to feature in the Blast but he is bowling in the net since vacated by Archer, pushing his seamers across a young batter.

Their influx into Sussex's band of guns-for-hire has been a fascinating curveball for a squad built on nous: between them, Bopara, Wright, Beer and Mills have racked up more than 1,000 T20 matches, and at least three of that quartet have been staples of the franchise circuit. Dan Christian promoted the adage when Nottinghamshire won in 2020, but it is little secret that T20's most frequent winners are the old guard.

"It can be a bit of a treadmill at times," Mills admits. "That's the nature of T20 cricket. So, when you bring in these young guys and you can sense their excitement and energy, it does rub off on everyone, for sure."

^{Sussex are among the favourites for the 2022 Blast title (Steve Bardens/Getty Images)}

Garton can feel it too. Not long ago, he was in their shoes: a teenager fast-tracked into the professional game to considerable hype and expectation, with English cricket obsessed by his left-arm angle, balletic action and high ceiling. Six summers on, he is more rounded: one of the circuit's best fielders, an improving batter and still the left-armer who was catapulted into an Ashes touring party on potential.

He comes into this season with a new sense of seniority; not only is he Bopara's vice-captain – "a leadership role without giving me too much straight away" – but he is also on the back of a winter that featured debuts in the Indian Premier League, Big Bash and for England. Garton is nothing if not self-aware, and he knows what that means.

"But if you look at Wrighty, Jofra, Tymal and Ravi, the reason they're in those competitions is that they perform consistently – not because they reach their potential once in a few games," he says.

"I always expect the best from me, and I expect really high standards from myself. But I don't tend to look at other people's expectations of me. I think people have expected a lot from me since day one."

Reminiscing of his own day one, he sees bits of himself in the unbridled enthusiasm of Lenham's generation. "You see how excited they are to come in every day," he adds, smiling. "Archie had a brilliant attitude. Yes, he was young, but he came in with the approach that he was good enough. He proved that, and he fit right in. No one had to mollycoddle him or anything.

"It's my sixth year now, so it's quite nice to see people with that joy. I can see them learning and looking carefully at everything that the experienced players do. That's what I did when I was younger.

"I'm certainly more conscious of how I come across to the younger lads and the need to be a good role model. I want that to rub off on them for when they're in the same position as me in six years' time."

Part of that means tweaking his own character as a young leader: "I'm not going to change who I am as a person to try to please other people," he says, "but I know sometimes I need to learn that not everyone is the same as me in how they respond to feedback."

These outdoor sessions only started for the white-ball team at the beginning of May, but there is a trust between players and coaching staff that means Sussex will be ready when they face Glamorgan at Hove on May 26 in their Blast opener. There is still a smattering on international stardust to come, too: Rashid Khan's relationship with the county is the envy of the competition, while Josh Philippe, Tim Seifert and Mohammad Rizwan are all set to feature at different times as wicketkeeper-batters.

^{Archie Lenham was born a year after the Twenty20 Cup started (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)}

Rizwan is playing in the County Championship as well, but Mills speaks highly of Kirtley's ability to knit together two squads into one ahead of a campaign that, this year, will be played in a single block.

"We're one of the only clubs that almost has two separate squads," he says. "There's a bit of crossover, but we have five or six guys who only play T20 cricket, and the club has done really well in managing that to make sure we don't just have five or six guys turning up in May and trying to figure it out. You still need that team aspect, so that guys are around the club as much as possible rather than just popping in and expecting to have that team unity."

Despite all this, it's 13 years since Sussex last won a tournament they appear built to win. They have reached the knockout stage in each of the last four years but have contrived never to quite make it over the line in that time. There is a shared acceptance that the impending departures of Salt and Chris Jordan made last autumn's semi-final defeat against Kent particularly difficult, with David Wiese also playing his last game for the club. Wright has spent part of his winter asking himself "if, as captain, there was any more we could have done".

But there is also an acknowledgement that losing the 2018 final against Worcestershire was "the real missed opportunity".

Wright reflects: "When I look back, we should have got more runs anyway, but if you'd offered us them needing 40 runs off four overs when we had Jofra, CJ and Millsy, we'd have snapped your hand off, and we should have won. But Ben Cox played unbelievably well."

The major fillip for all 18 counties in this year's tournament is the likelihood of overseas players being available for Finals Day. The lengthy gap between everything else and the showpiece culmination often meant that star signings were unavailable on international duty or simply unable to return when it mattered most. Sussex, for example, have never taken Rashid to Edgbaston. "An unfortunate by-product," Mills calls it. He has played in every franchise tournament going so is well placed to comment.

"Also, you can carry momentum from the group stage into the quarter-finals and into Finals Day. Whereas last year you could play the group and play brilliantly, but then there was a huge gap until the quarter-final."

Last summer, Sussex's quarter-final against Yorkshire took place on the neutral territory of Chester-le-Street, with Headingley hosting England's Test against India. The consequence was a sparse crowd and a muted atmosphere. Having overcome Yorkshire mainly thanks to Rashid's remarkable late salvo with the bat, all impetus had to be bottled up for three more weeks ahead of Finals Day. By then, he was at the rescheduled IPL.

^{Tymal Mills is one of several players at Sussex on a white-ball contract (Harry Trump/Getty Images)}

"It was all very disjointed," says Mills. "I definitely feel like this schedule is a better one, for sure."

Kirtley is phlegmatic as he reflects on the Kent defeat. Since then, he has sat down with Luke Dunning, the county's highly regarded analyst, to sift through their campaign and study where they went wrong. To look over scorecards, they anonymised player names and replaced them with chocolate bars "so we couldn't associate them with who we thought they were".

The objective was straightforward: "Did we get the entry points right? Did we get the matchups right? There were two or three things that really sung out to us as things that we need to do to make us better."

Not that Kirtley considers his regime to be reliant on numbers per se. "It's an informed team, but we're not data-driven," he explains. The challenge for him, as well as Dunning, is to filter through the statistics at their fingertips and divulge the important bits.

"All we can do as a coaching unit is provide the information," he says. "You have to trust the player. If you're not trusting lads who've played 400 games of T20 cricket: there's the information, but we'll back you 100 per cent. There is probably no better information than what Ravi or Luke Wright have in their experience."

Mills has no official captaincy experience but has become an increasingly vocal presence in every team he's been part of, such is the enormity of his experience: when he returned to international cricket ahead of last year's T20 World Cup, Hove was the only ground where he had bowled more deliveries across his career than the Dubai International Cricket Stadium, the venue of England's opener.

"I'm not afraid to speak up in the meetings and share experiences," he says. "I've played in pretty much every franchise league, and you'll always have some experience of playing against the different batters."

For Wright, these are the final throes of an exceptional career, and the chance to focus on batting is a welcome shift. "Normally, at this point you're worried about everyone else," he says.

"But actually just being able to be selfish in a way and concentrate on myself, I've got rid of that burden. Whether it's Delray Rawlins or any young lads who are around, I'll try to pass on my knowledge. I'm 37 this year, and I know that time will at some point come to an end, so I want to enjoy it as much as possible.

"Myself and Ravi aren't getting any younger, so it's about trying to integrate the young guys over the next two years, making sure those guys are starting to get in and also progress, so when we do finish it's not suddenly a drop-off with them taking two or three years to get ready. That's for people above my paygrade to plan for!

"There is some real talent in these young batters. Our role is helping them to put it together; they've all got the power game, but it's actually explaining to them when to use it and when not to."

Buy tickets for Sussex's home matches in the 2022 Vitality Blast by clicking here.

To buy tickets for individual matches, click on the links below.

Glamorgan (May 26) 

Kent (May 29)

Middlesex (June 3)

Gloucestershire (June 10) 

Surrey (June 23)

Essex (July 1)

Hampshire (July 3)