Cosgrove ready for Outlaws challenge

Mark Cosgrove said Leicestershire Foxes are determined to end their NatWest T20 Blast campaign on a winning note tomorrow evening.

The Foxes take on a Nottinghamshire Outlaws side who still harbour qualification hopes, but if Northants and Lancashire win, our opponents will require a victory that significantly improves their run rate.

Cosgrove wants to send the Foxes fans home happy by producing a performance and result that also gives the side impetus going into Sunday’s Royal London One Day Cup opener against Surrey.

“You don’t want to lose any game,” he said. “We beat Nottinghamshire at their own ground, so it’s a big game for us to see if we can back up what we did there. We need to show that performance and result wasn’t a one off.

“It’s also a local game and that’s important to the club and the fans. In these situations you have to try to win and spoil somebody else’s fun. We want to go out there and put in a performance like we did at the start of the competition.

“We have played some very good white ball cricket in patches and a good game on Friday night would give us some momentum to take into the Surrey match on Sunday. It’s a big game for us.”

Former Foxes Harry Gurney and James Taylor will be making returns to Grace Road and the left arm seamer is looking forward to a reunion with his former teammates.

He said: “Grace Road will always be a special place for myself and Titch (James Taylor) and it always feels slightly weird going back but the main priority is to make sure we get the two points, otherwise we can’t qualify.”

Taylor added: “The whole situation’s not ideal. But we’ve got ourselves into this situation and hopefully we can get ourselves out of it by winning the fourth of what we knew, would be four finals.

“That’s the way we’ve got to look at it and obviously it’s against one of our local rivals, so it’s a very big game for us but hopefully we can get over the line and make it four out of four. Then it depends on other results going our way as well.”

The Foxes could hand a debut to 21-year-old batsman and wicket-keeper Michael Burgess after he signed for the club today. Burgess was in good form for Loughborough MCCU earlier this season and has also impressed in the Second XI.

Leicestershire will be without Grant Elliott, who has linked up with New Zealand for their tour of South Africa and Zimbabwe, while Kevin O’Brien, Niall O’Brien and Rob Taylor are with Ireland and Scotland in the ICC T20 World Qualifiers.

SQUAD: Cosgrove (capt), Ali, Agathangelou, Burgess, Eckersley, Freckingham, Hill, McKay, Naik, Raine, Sayer, Shreck, Wells.