PLAYER DIARY: Fi Morris on T20 County Cup and successful start to season
I always look forward to when the T20s come around, and it starts for us this weekend with a trip down to Glamorgan on Saturday afternoon in the new Vitality County Cup.
I’d say that T20 is probably my favourite format, and this is a competition we’re looking to get ahead in, win it and go into the Vitality Blast full of confidence.
This new competition, including all counties from the three tiers, is a pretty cool concept.
It’s county cricket’s FA Cup, and I’m really looking forward to playing against some different teams.
There’s only seven other teams we will play against in the Blast, so it will be nice to go down to Glamorgan and test ourselves against a Tier 2 county.
They call the underdogs the giant slayers in the FA Cup, don’t they. I’m a big Liverpool fan, and we were beaten by Plymouth in the fourth round back in February, which wasn’t ideal. I definitely don’t want to experience that this weekend!
The knockout element every time you play will be a good challenge.
There’s going to be loads of pressure on. It’ll be like a final every time you chase.
That can only be good thing for us as players in terms of progression.
It’s been a really good start to the season for us in the Metro Bank One-Day Cup.
We’ve won five of our opening seven matches. Yes, there’s been a disappointment or two along the way. We felt we should have beaten Essex at Chelmsford at the start of the month. We weren’t at our best with the bat in that game.
But if you had offered us this position before the start of the season, we’d have definitely taken it, being up amongst the leaders in the table.
We speak about eight wins from the 14 group games being enough to get you into the top four places for semi-final qualification, and we’re more than halfway there. So we’re definitely very happy. Hopefully we can finish off this first block of the 50-over stuff with another win against Durham at Blackpool on Monday.
Personally, my best performances of the summer so far came in our wins over Surrey at Southport, when we chased down 297 with a couple of overs to spare, and Warwickshire at Edgbaston on Wednesday.
I was absolutely delighted to be able to take 5-48 against Warwickshire as we defended a target of 277. That was a brilliant win for us, our third on the bounce.
It was a really good team performance, with three fifties from Emma Lamb once again, Katie Mack and Sophie Ecclestone - Ellie Threlkeld was also did brilliantly at the end to get us up to a good total which we felt was above par.
Then, with the ball, there was good support for me from the likes of Kate Cross, Mahika Gaur, Sophie and Lamby, who all claimed a wicket each. Grace Potts kept it tight as well.
I finished with 90 not out and shared 84 for the fourth wicket with Katie in our match against Surrey last week.
We’ve had a couple of big partnerships over the last couple of seasons, and she’s great to bat with.
She stays calm and keeps it really nice and simple.
There’s a lot of running between the wickets with her, and she makes me look a bit slow in comparison to her. But she’s got loads of experience and always tends to score at a good rate, which takes the pressure off me at the other end.
I actually had a bit of a kit malfunction in that game. I realised I’d forgotten my shirt the night before, so I rung Sophie Morris and asked her could I borrow one of hers.
I didn’t think anyone would notice the difference in squad numbers on the back, but they did.
It is pretty handy for that kind of thing having two Morris’s in the squad.
I had a bit of a shocker, but when I realised, I thought, ‘This is perfect’.
