WITH three defeats from their opening four matches in this season’s NatWest T20 Blast competition, Essex Eagles will be looking for a positive result when making the short trip to The Oval to face Surrey this evening.
The Eagles have named an unchanged 14-man squad following Sunday’s nail-biting defeat by Glamorgan, when the Welsh county prevailed by five wickets off the final delivery of the match.
Surrey beat Essex in the opening match of the campaign and are now able to include former England batsman Kevin Pietersen in their side, who is available for the remainder of the competition.
Although there are still ten group matches to be played, Eagles head coach Chris Silverwood insists that his charges need to quickly put together a sequence of wins if they are to reach the qualifying stages.
Silverwood said: “I think that there are a number of games that you can afford to lose in this competition but we don’t want to be using them all up too soon.
“So we need to get back to winning ways and put a decent run of results together.
“We have to turn the corner and start to make things happen.
“Sunday’s defeat to Glamorgan was disappointing but you have to give Colin Ingram credit for that magnificent century. It was an unbelievable game of cricket though.
“What was particularly disappointing for us was that Varun Chopra was to finish on the losing side.
“He scored a terrific hundred and showed what a good player he is.
“He played some fantastic shots and got us off to a good start and, as I say, it’s a shame he didn’t get the reward his efforts deserved by ending on the winning side.
“There is obviously room for improvement to our game and we are constantly trying to address those areas in the hope that we can start to string some positive results together.”
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