The intense professional rigour that has served Warwickshire so well in all three competitions this year was typified by a second-wicket stand of 110 between Jonathan Trott, with an impeccable 58 of precise touch and exact placement, and Varun Chopra, the perfect anchor with 50.
It was Trott’s fifth score above fifty, including two hundreds, in eight innings of this new competition and, although both men fell within nine balls, only 84 runs were needed at 4.16 per over to see the club to their second final of the summer. This came at an eventual gallop for the loss of one more wicket as Tim Ambrose reached an unbeaten 51.
In sharp contrast, Kent’s glory days in one-day knockout cricket were long ago. Their last success in a Lord’s final came in 1978 when they secured a seventh limited-overs title in the six seasons before the Iron Lady came to power. It would be wrong to say they have been tin men since, but this was a match they badly needed to win.
They failed to come to terms, however, with a sluggish pitch, used for the one-day international two days before, with five men falling to catches from miscued hits across the line. Fabian Cowdrey, whose father, Chris, played in that Lord’s match, was the highest scorer in the top seven, making 34.
But none found fluent answers to the discipline of Boyd Rankin and Jeetan Patel. It proved a mistake both to go in first and also to bat Sam Billings at No 8. Soon faced with a score of 161 for eight in the 41st over, he made an unbeaten 40 but, of these, 23 came from his last nine balls.