Dave Allen: Trips To Canterbury & Beckenham

We have played T20 matches against Kent every year since the start in 2003, and our first away match came at Beckenham in that first season. The game featured two Aussies:  Simon Katich with 59* helped us to 145-6 which in those days seemed a reasonable total, until Andrew Symons smashed 96* from just 37 balls, and took Kent to victory with eight overs to spare!

In 2006 we were still playing Kent just once in the season and that year, again at Beckenham, Kent recovered from 37-6 to win by 15 runs (Thornely 4-22). Then in 2008 we played them home-and-away and visited Canterbury, both for the first time, but it was not a successful trip, despite Carberry’s third consecutive T20 half-century. 2009 brought another away venue, Tunbridge Wells, where Kent’s 192-4 was too much for Hampshire, despite Lumb’s 59 in a three-innings sequence in which he scored 276 runs in the T20.

Hampshire were on top in both low-scoring matches in 2010 - at Canterbury Danny Briggs recorded the remarkable figures of 4-0-5-3, and Simon Jones on a rare appearance took 3-20 as we bowled them out for 94. Later that year we won the trophy for the first time.

In 2011, we were back at Tunbridge Wells winning a rain-affected ‘Five5’ match by 20 runs, and in 2012 we won at Canterbury with 10 balls and six wickets to spare as Glenn Maxwell took 2-10 and hit 66* from 32 balls. This helped our progress to the Cardiff Finals Day and our second - and to date last - T20 Trophy.

We won one match each in 2013 with the outstanding performance Michael Carberry’s 83* at Canterbury where Dawson took 4-19 - still Hampshire’s best figures v Kent. In 2014 we did the double over Kent, Ervine with 47 and Chris Wood 4-24 leading the way at Canterbury and we won there again in 2015, thanks mainly to 99* from James Vince, our highest in these contests.

Kent’s winning total of 193-3 at Canterbury in 2016 was then their highest v Hampshire thanks to half-centuries from Billings and Denly, while in 2017 at Canterbury our two opening batsmen posted fifties on our way to another win – one was James Vince, but he was out-scored at the start by Calvin Dickinson with 51 from 24 balls, which proved to be his career best in T20.

In the past two years we met Kent at Beckenham again. In 2018 we posted our record total in this fixture of 207-7 (Dawson 75*, Alsop 41) but, recovering from 6-3 we could not quite reach the target of 211 (Billings 95*), while in 2019 we set a target of just 136 (Vince 44) and Kent just got home with one ball to spare (Kuhn 41, Abbott 3-31).

Words: Dave Allen