NICK HOWSON: A late pick by Welsh Fire for the men's Hundred, the Derbyshire quick unseated Birmingham Phoenix's Moeen Ali and Liam Livingstone during an inspired display in Cardiff
"The most exciting group of bowlers I can remember working with," was how Kevin Shine described the battery of seamers he oversaw during an ECB pace-bowling camp in February 2018.
Alongside Jamie Porter, Toby Roland-Jones and Reece Topley was a scruffy, raw 19-year-old George Scrimshaw. Ten days in South Africa set the right-armer up for the rest of his career and put him firmly on England's radar.
What followed was a catalogue of injuries, his release by Worcestershire and a fight for his future. Derbyshire came to the rescue to keep him in the county game, but he's been forced to scrap and grind it out ever since.
If 2018 to 2021 was the rain, 2022 has been the rainbow. Scrimshaw has been among the stand-out bowlers on the domestic circuit and thrust himself back onto the radar.
Moeen Ali was dismissed for just 10 (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
Richard Gleeson and James Fuller were the only seamers to collect more than Scrimshaw's 23 Blast wickets for Derbyshire. While others were going around the park in the quarter-final embarrassment against Somerset, he took 2 for 16.
In the space of three days in July, he was back in the England picture in the form of a Lions call-up to play South Africa and was picked by Welsh Fire as a men's Hundred wildcard. Everything was suddenly coming up Scrimshaw.
All that said, he is some distance from being a household name or being in a position to emulate any of his compatriots from that trip to the Rainbow Nation more than four years ago.
But performances like these will start to ensure he is consistently spoken about as one of the best emerging seamers on the circuit. This was an accurate, probing and potent spell of bowling that achieved the deadly combination of keeping the runs down and taking key wickets.
And they don't come more important than Moeen Ali and Liam Livingstone, who are bound for Australia to help England try and win the T20 World Cup.
The Phoenix skipper was caught trying to flick one to the boundary down the leg-side, only feathering one through to Joe Clarke. Livingstone fell trying to scoop Scrimshaw into the stand and lost his off-stump.
Livingstone was castled trying to scoop the ball to the rope (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
Combined with five dots and just two boundaries, Scrimshaw's back-to-back sets was one of the best we've seen in the competition. There were variations in length - a fuller delivery got Livingstone having originally gone short - but no tricks. Even in this condensed format, bowling quick and back of a length pays dividends.
We're fortunate enough at The Cricketer to have ample opportunity to speak to schools about their cricket programmes. One of the themes is how there remains an onus on honing red-ball skills and using them as a platform for shorter forms of the sport. It is a refreshing outlook as the professional game increasing uses white-ball cricket to inform selection for multi-day cricket.
And while that is all good and well, seeing it for real on a stage like The Hundred reaffirms that policy. Any like-minded kids tuning in will hopefully have been inspired.
Twelve dots, two wickets and just three boundaries from 20 deliveries was an outstanding return against an intimidating Phoenix line-up. It seemed to have laid the platform for a first victory of the campaign, before Kane Richardson and Tom Helm helped defend 130, but once again there is little
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