Among the wreckage of the Steelbacks’ 2011 Friends Life t20 campaign, Alex Wakely stood out like a beacon.
A tally of 360 runs from 13 innings may not be groundbreaking, but everything is relative, and for Wakely they showed that his one-day game was maturing nicely.
So much so that he is now one of the first names on the team sheet and one of the side’s pivotal players.
And despite his success, the 23-year-old is looking to go one better this time around.
He said: “My kind of game was fairly straightforward.
“Often I was coming in after we’d lost a couple of early wickets and it was more about stabilising things than attacking straight from the start.
“It’s nice to know that I’ve played well in this format of the game and that I can take what I’ve learned and bring it into this year’s games.
“My aim will be to do the same kind of thing and just try to up the strike rate a bit. If we can have three or four lads all doing that then we can produce the kind of scores that we need.”
Those kind of scores were rare, if not nearly non-existent, last year as the Steelbacks’ struggles with the bat manifested themselves in a 16-game run that mustered just a pair of victories.
But rather than dwell on their bad experience, Wakely says that 2011 will be consigned to the rubbish bin and, instead, confidence will be drawn from the seasons when the knockout stages were visited regularly.
He added: “We’ve had a meeting and we’re just going to forget about last year.
“We’ve played well in this competition in the past and it is up to us to try and emulate that.
“The years when we got to the finals day and the quarter-finals, they showed that we can play in this competition and our aim has to be to do that again.”