Horley salutes will to win as Middlesex women book final place

Horley’s side appeared down and out in the game played at Radlett both at 51-5 in their batting innings and again when their visitors were 99-2 in reply and needing just 66 to win with plenty of time to get them.

Yet they created huge energy in the field with constant vocal chatter backed up with pressure cricket which forced mistakes as their opponent’s crumbled to135 all out, meaning Middlesex will play Glamorgan in the title showdown in Bristol.

"It’s a thing with this group, there are skills everywhere, but there is also a want and a drive in situations where you are on the back foot that is really hard to come by," said Horley.

"Broomy (head coach Marc Broom) is all about hostility and hype in the field. Hype is our motto for the fielding stuff.

“I guess it is the way we want to be perceived from an outside perspective because it shows it is spreading beyond being just within us. It is going outside of that and then the batters must feel it.

“We talk about winning little periods of time. The first period didn’t go towards us, it went their way because they played well at the start, and then you kind of find a little bit of momentum. This group is so good at feeding on little bits of momentum staying in the game and staying level.

“It doesn’t take a wicket in this group to get our energy back up. I always remind the girls it doesn’t need to be a wicket to get ourselves ahead or to get ourselves even. It’s about can we stem their flow? Can we stop their boundaries and make them rotate as maybe they don’t want to do that?

“That is what brings the change of energy from an atmosphere point of view and then it’s really key that once we get on top we stay on top and don’t let the game fade.”

Horley herself will take much of the plaudits for her 4-27, not to mention the winning run out, but the skipper agreed it was leg-spinner Hannah Davis (2-24) who began the momentum shift.

The 22-year-old squeezed the Northants batters with a string of relentless dots – 33 in all from her 48 deliveries – which inevitably forced errors.

“I think ‘Dave’ (Davis) started that whole chain of events, I really do,” she continued. “She was the big game changer to slow run-rate down. She wasn’t necessarily getting wickets for it, but when she did get one I was like you deserve a wicket because of the work you did.

“The amount of dots and pressure she was putting on made it easier for the bowler at the other end to do their job.”

"Again it comes back to that team mentality of you do your job at one end, and we try and do our job at the other.

"Then, suddenly they start to play rash shots they don’t need to play in the situation they’re in, but because the pressure is from both ends and it’s relentless they make a silly mistake, it costs them their wicket and suddenly the door is open.”

The fact Middlesex had anything to bowl at was really down to middle-order batter Abbie Whybrow, who came in with her side’s back against the wall at 51-5 and played a gem of an innings, scoring a run-a-ball 75 with a six and 11 fours.

By the time she was ninth out Middlesex had 159 on the board and were able to set a revised target under DLS of 165. It wasn’t many and didn’t appear to be enough, but it proved to be so.

“Abbie was exceptional and she has done that more than once,” added Horley. “I was away in Australia when they played Northants here a couple of weeks ago and she did the same thing at No.7. That’s 75 and 80 in two games and that is so important.

“While it is not really her job to do that (what she did today) it is part of her job at times and it shows she is so key at that point and that she can be so effective in adapting to a situation.”