Tom Curran hat-trick outshines Glamorgan's stunning fielding on night of unfathomable chaos

NICK FRIEND AT THE OVAL: Among cricket’s oldest adages is the notion that a team never has more control than when it is together as one – eleven against two, the hunters hunting, a unit fielding every ball as though its entire cosmos depends on it

An exercise in ruthlessness. In two parts.

Uncomplicated, streetwise, an exhibition of white-ball cricket. Twice. First Glamorgan. Then Surrey.

Halfway through a strange old evening at Surrey’s raucous home, the Welsh county looked certain to continue a hugely dominant run at The Oval; they had – until 9.30pm at least – never lost a game of T20 cricket here and on this ferociously humid evening, they had – for long parts – done little wrong.

Yet, if records are, indeed, there to be broken, then go and break them with a bulldozing fist. Drive through them at the speed of light. Why not, hey?

Oddly, it would be wrong to look back on this barnstorming night as a turbulent thriller. Quite simply, it lacked any real final twist. There was a first half and there was a second half. There was a moment when one side dominated. There was a moment when the other side dominated. That was it.

The lowest score in English domestic T20 history – quite the effort from a Glamorgan side that, genuinely – and this is no condescending fib, were heroically superb for the first half of this game. Their biggest error, perhaps, was in witnessing a similarly furious fielding display from their hosts.

Surrey’s effort was one whose foundations had been laid by Tom Curran – not just his bowling, but his intensity. Anyone that has followed English cricket in recent times will have recognised Surrey’s bounding forcefield as a group of men geed up by a Curran.

Among cricket’s oldest adages is the notion that a team never has more control than when it is together as one – eleven against two, the hunters hunting, a solitary unit fielding each and every ball as though its entire cosmos depends on it.

There was a moment in last week’s World Cup final; watch Ben Stokes’ infamous dive once more, you know you want to. Watch the deflection, watch the ball race away. And then pause it.

Pause it just as the feet of a lonesome fielder positioned at a wide fine leg come into view. He is motionless. He is stood still. He is paralysed alongside the rest of the cricketing universe.

Colin de Grandhomme races down from short third man; his sprint is forlorn. The ball trickles into the rope and pops up off the advertising triangle back into his hand. It is a convenient bounce, but in the fashion of the most devastating paradox.

Forty yards away, there stands that fielder. Frozen. Frozen in time. Whether he would have tracked down this trickling moment of unrivaled fortune is an unsolvable mystery.

To the untrained eye, he may well have done. In the intangible laws of fate – the regulations by which Stokes functioned in that unexplainable hour, who truly knows?

Yet, in all the drama of this extraordinary moment and its reaction, the part of that one nameless figure has never been discussed. Perhaps, he has not even been spotted by a nation of armchair analysts since.

The energy of a cricketing universe has been focused solely on that white sphere, rolling towards an unscriptable narrative. For England, it dribbled. For New Zealanders, it raced.

^{Imran Tahir ended with three wickets}

The point of this deviation from a crazy night at The Oval, however, is in that split second of stillness. For once in that frantic final, one man felt he was not involved. In short-format cricket, that is never the case; if each delivery is an event, then every fielder has a role to play. Here, that could not have been truer.

And as Glamorgan danced all over Fortress Surrey – their own second home, a ground where they had never lost in T20 cricket, Colin Ingram had his side operating out of the palm of his hand. Two hours later, Jade Dernbach was running a similarly faultless machine.

Where there was a ball, there was a fielder. Where there was a catch to be taken, there were two hands – sometimes four – waiting to do the honours. Neither team chased in pairs, but in flocks. And if these games were decided on huntsmanship alone, picking a winner would have been an almost impossible task.

When Matt Maynard sought to explain the unexplainable as the dust settled, he pleaded that he be permitted to begin with a word for his team’s fielding effort. He had every right.

Aaron Finch was supremely caught on the mid-wicket fence by Billy Root – the sort of take now so absurdly cast off as routine; he made terrific ground as the ball swirled in the humid air, before gathering off-balance, lobbing the ball up in the air as he continued his stylish hopscotch around the boundary rope, and finally completing the catch as he returned to the field of play.

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That is brilliance – it is also reward for the diet of similar chances nailed at Root and his teammates during an intense pre-match warmup. But it is also the sign of a happy team, an outfit at one with itself. The celebrations of both bowler Andrew Salter and wicketkeeper Chris Cooke paid sufficient homage. Arms aloft, legs pounding, they sprinted to join their colleague on the Oval outfield.

That kind of event, though, is the exception. The norm was everything else; Tom Curran was superbly held by David Lloyd in the ring, while whenever the ball flew across a moist outfield, there was a Glamorgan body in front of it.

In reality, it should be of no surprise. Ingram is a specialist in this format – not merely with the bat, but as a man who gets it. T20 teams the world over seek him out for his availability, for his runs, for his nous. Quite simply, he knows what he is seeking to squeeze from his side. Every chance was taken, every half-chance was snaffled. For half the game – the half that Ingram could control – his team were excellent.

^{Gareth Batty dismissed Pakistan batsman Fakhar Zaman}

Of a chaotic chase with the bat, Maynard struggled for words. Sometimes, there are none. Quite frankly. It’s a weird ol’ game that does funny things like that.

During a rare moment of calm during a crazy night, a fox had stridden onto the field, totally undaunted by its 25,000-strong audience. It sat, parading itself to its crowd like a prize car on a 1980s quiz show. And then, with some fair chutzpah about it, it lifted a hind leg, marking its territory in the socially acceptable manner that no human could ever accomplish.

And then, it sat and admired what it had done. Eventually, it left the stage – but only once it had done what it was there to do. A steward armed with a shovel was left to clear what remained.

It was the kind of truly weird episode that only occurs on nights like this. That it was followed by something yet more bizarre should, therefore, have been of no real surprise.

Forty-four runs for the loss of ten wickets.

But even then, Surrey were as superb as Glamorgan had been earlier on. This wasn’t a collapse in its traditional sense – it wasn’t a defeat built on incompetence. Not in the slightest.

The difference, ultimately, was Curran. Lose three wickets in the powerplay of a T20 game and you lose more games than you win. Here, Glamorgan lost three in three balls in the second over of the chase. Best of luck from there.

Bang, bang, bang. One, two three. Curran had ripped the heart of this game out of Glamorgan’s reach in a trio of deliveries – a supreme T20 hat-trick.

Marchant de Lange had taken three in four balls earlier in the evening, though his had come at the death and had enjoyed the additional bonus of Gareth Batty slapping over his own stumps.

Curran, though, bowled four-day lengths and was rewarded. First Lloyd, then Ingram, then Root. That was it. Shell-shocked beyond reasonable belief, Glamorgan never recovered. But then, nor did they have to. In a curious sense, there was little shame in being on the end of a hiding such as this.

It is almost tougher to lose a close game than one in which you are palpably blown away. Maynard said as much afterwards; he was unusually upbeat given the scenario, but then it felt like the right mood. In amongst a brutal scoreline, there lay plenty with which to work, positives to find.

^{The invasion of a fox provided an unusual interlude in proceedings}

Everything about Curran was quite palpably that of a World Cup winner, while he and Jordan Clark later combined for the same catch earlier taken by Root.

The oldest of the three cricketing brothers, he is a competitor like few others – a man who has grown a thousand feet in recent times. A champion of the world despite six weeks patrolling the Lucozades, he will have been an immensely valuable character in that England camp.

Here, he was ferocious. An under-par score with the bat, a terrific wicket, the startling necessity of a fast start.

For half of this contest, Glamorgan had been supreme. It had been a merciless display. Two hours later, they had been bitten back by a fiercely organised operation that Ingram – and Glamorgan – would have recognised in themselves.

It was a game founded on brilliance in the field. It’s the only part of the game when, as a team, you are truly in control.

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