Willey leads from front as Northants survive scare

David Willey captained Northants to the final with a tough, hard-fought win built on a scrappy defensive effort.

Willey leads from the frontAs captain, Willey set the tone — with bat, ball, or in the field — to keep Northants in control under pressure. Scrappy defenceIt wasn’t pretty, but Northants defended their total with grit. They held their nerve in tight moments and squeezed out the win. The victory books Northants a place in the final, with Willey the driving force behind getting them over the line.

A captain’s performance from Willey and a scrappy team defence saw Northants grind their way into the final.Put into bat, Northants struggled to post 143 all out with Jake Ball taking 4 for 17 - the joint-best figures in a Blast semi. Chris Lynn made 39 off 26 but only two of his team-mates managed to reach 20, with Somerset's versatile seam attack fully exploiting a grippy surface.

The Somerset chase initially misfired as they stumbled to 12 for 3 in the third over, but Will Smeed jolted them back to life when plundering 28 from the final powerplay over, bowled by Luke Procter. Smeed fell one run short of fifty, however, thanks to a wonderful diving catch from wicketkeeper Lewis McManus, and the asking rate began to climb again as James Sales and Calvin Harrison bowled thrifty spells through the middle.

Somerset collapse

Tom Kohler-Cadmore struggled to 29 off 37 and fell next over. With 40 needed off 20, pressure was on. Craig Overton came in — the hero of Somerset’s quarter-final comeback at Headingley — and hit one boundary. But then he couldn’t clear the diving Willey at long-on. Willey’s stunning flick back from over the rope basically ended Somerset’s hopes.

This is a battle-hardened Somerset team, however, who have seen it all before - not least when getting home from a position of 82 for 8 chasing 162 against Yorkshire on Wednesday night. They had to wait until the fourth over before Kohler-Cadmore scored their first boundary, and were still looking a bit scratchy at the end of the fifth, as Smeed twice mistimed shots off Willey that landed safely.

The return of Ball to bowl the 12th over sent the Northants innings into a slow tailspin, as a well-executed offcutter dipped under Lynn's bat to hit off stump. Zaib's painstaking knock finally came a cropper against another Ball slower ball two overs later, and Northants floundered through the back half. They only managed to hit two boundaries from the 13th over onwards, Ball rounding out his figures with the dismissals of McManus and Procter, again to pace-off deliveries.