He is still raw, but Sonny Baker is learning fast. He showed in Saturday's T20 Blast final that his quick yorkers can be devastating, but dragged his length back to suit the surface at Lord's on Thursday night, hitting the top of Liam Livingstone's leg stump to secure a tight win for the newly rebranded Manchester Super Giants over London Spirit.
Baker enjoyed a breakout tournament in the Hundred last year, with Jason Roy, Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow among his high-profile scalps. It earned him England white-ball call-ups at the age of 22 but his early forays in international cricket have not gone well: he took 0 for 76 (ODI) and 0 for 52 (T20I) on his limited-overs debut, and 3 for 161 in his first Test last month.
But he is an enthusiastic character with an obvious desire for self-improvement, and has been hugely successful in short-format cricket over the past 10 days. Baker took five-wicket hauls in both the Blast quarter-finals and final for Hampshire, and conceded just four runs - including a leg-bye - off the last five balls at Lord's on Thursday to close out an eight-run win.
That included the key wicket of Livingstone - one of two men in the match to reach 25 - for 69 off 40 balls. After a brief chat with Aiden Markram, Baker pushed fine leg back to give himself four out on the longer, leg-side boundary, stuck to a good length on a pitch that offered something for the seamers throughout, and hit 90mph/145kph to knock back leg stump.
"Often I'd go to yorkers," Baker said. "That's probably one of my super-strengths: banging people in the feet. But given the context of the wicket, as the scores would reflect, it was a relatively tricky surface… Conditions most of the time override [your own strengths]. My go-to might be yorkers, but if length balls are really hard to hit, bowl your length balls, right?"
Baker was one of three England fast bowlers in the Super Giants attack, and said that Gus Atkinson (2 for 15 from 20 balls) and Josh Tongue (1 for 26 from 20) had helped him recover from an expensive start.
"The communication throughout the squad was brilliant," he said. "Tonguey and Gus have played international cricket for a little while now, and the communication as a group was a really massive factor in that you keep passing bits of information over and it makes a really, really big difference in terms of the clarity."
It has been a quick turnaround for Baker since Hampshire's defeat in the Blast final, and he said that he had found it "pretty tough" to get over. "It's never easy with stuff like that. I'm two silver medals from two trips to Finals Day, so that's been pretty tough. It's pretty frustrating.
"We wanted to win that so badly, especially me. I'm desperate to win, but I hate losing. I might love winning, but I definitely hate losing. You allow yourself to be disappointed for a period of time. You have a little bit of a break going in, and then crack on with a new competition with a new set of lads."