No regrets for Dickson as Somerset lose their third title in a week

After a first-day washout in the Metro Bank One-Day Cup final at Trent Bridge, Glamorgan managed to beat both Somerset and the weather to regain the title that they last won in 2021, in a competition that was pragmatically reduced from 50-overs-a-side to 20 to maximise the prospect of a result.

It was, as Sam Northeast, Glamorgan’s matchwinning batter, said: “the right thing to do in the circumstances”. That sentiment was echoed by Somerset’s captain, Sean Dickson, who insisted his over-riding emotion was one of pride even as his team saw a third title slip through their fingers in the space of a week, after their loss in the T20 Blast final at Edgbaston and Surrey’s County Championship triumph on Friday.

“We hadn’t played any Twenty20 for a while so it was strange coming into a 20-over contest,” Northeast told the ECB Reporters Network, after top-scoring for his team with 63 not out from 49 balls. “We didn’t even know we were going to get a game at all, so the change from 50 to 20 overs, about 40 minutes before, meant we had to adapt as best as possible.

“In the event, it started to rain just as we were coming off, so somebody was clearly looking down on us. I’m glad they did make the change. It was the right thing to do in the circumstances, to get the game on.”

Somerset had made the early running after winning the toss and choosing to bowl, with Alfie Ogborne, their 21-year-old left-armer seamer, claiming two wickets in his first over. However, the team’s inexperience was exposed at key moments of the contest, particularly while Northeast, Billy Root and Timm van der Gugten were accelerating through the back-end of their innings to add 115 in the final ten overs.

“We didn’t really know what a good score was,” Northeast said. “So from my point of view it was just about building partnerships, getting a bit of a platform and trying to accelerate once we had a feel for the pitch.

“At one point we thought 160 might be okay but that little innings from Timm van der Gugten at the end gave us what we thought was a pretty good score, one that we knew would be competitive. Timm hit the ball really cleanly and Billy Root through the middle too, and the way Will Smale got us off to a bit of a flyer meant we had something to build on.”

With Somerset choosing to back the players that had carried them through to the final, it meant they were missing 11 players who had featured in this year’s Men’s Hundred, which had run concurrent with the group stages. Their most experienced player on the day was England’s left-armer spinner, Jack Leach, but between the damp conditions and the List A regulation fields that limited the number of out-fielders through the middle overs, he did not get a bowl.

“As a county, we’ve ended up winning nothing when we would have liked to finish with at least one or two trophies,” Dickson said. “But the bottom line is that we have just competed for three trophies and we are really proud as a squad that we have been able to do that.

“In this competition, we have resisted the temptation to bring back guys that we lost to the Hundred, so I’m hugely proud that this squad in particular made it all the way to the final.

“And we were much happier today to be able to go out and try to win on the field, rather than have had a total washout and shared the trophy. No one wants to share a trophy, everyone wants a bash at trying to be a winner.

“We were fine playing it as a T20. We just wanted to get a game on, as did they. We had a discussion with the umpires, the match ref and the ECB ref that was there so we were all on board.

“We could analyse all day where the game was won and lost but I think they obviously bowled better than us. With the fresh pitch, it definitely offered something with the new ball up top.

“Our bowlers were slipping and sliding all over the place, which was unfortunate, but that’s what you get for choosing to bowl first and we just have to take our medicine and move forward.”