Gareth Batty: A victory over Hampshire would give us a huge boost

Surrey skipper Gareth Batty
(Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
Gareth Batty15 July 2016

After this week’s draw with Yorkshire, we’ve got a very big week of cricket coming up — both in the County Championship and the T20 Blast.

There’s not a lot to say about a game like the one we’ve had this week. When you lose the best part of two days cricket because of the weather — and play on a very dull, slow and placid surface — it makes it impossible to get a positive result.

As well as this, we are very aware that we need to be batting better and scoring more runs in the first innings to set matches up.

We go to Southampton to play Hampshire on Sunday in a game that is the cricketing equivalent of a six pointer and probably our biggest match of the season so far.

With just six games left in the Championship season, we really need some wins and Hampshire are one of the sides that are around us in the table. We haven’t played them at all yet this summer, so a win in this game would be huge in our season.

It’s also a big week of T20 Blast cricket, starting tonight in Tunbridge Wells when we go and play Kent.

Everyone is beating everyone else in the T20 Blast, which makes both for a good competition for the fans and ensures high-quality cricket. Kent have got some dangerous players but will also be looking at our dangerous players and if we play how we want to play we’ll be in a good place.

After that we visit Lord’s for the return London derby against Middlesex and then host Sussex at the Kia Oval next Friday night.

It’s quite likely that we’ll play in front of more than 55,000 people over two nights, which is huge and something we’re all pretty excited about.

I certainly feel that we’re a team who play well in front of big numbers of people — we’re used to it given our T20 crowds in recent years — but we’re also a team who want to entertain.

We’ll be missing Tom Curran for the next fortnight or so as he goes off to play for the England Lions. It’s brilliant and well deserved for him but we’ll miss him — and his younger brother, Sam, who will join up with them later in the series.

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