MOEEN Ali has been rewarded for an outstanding season with bat and ball after picking up the county FTI Most Valuable Player Award.
The 26-year-old snatched the £10,000 prize on the penultimate day of Worcestershire’s LV= County Championship win against Northamptonshire from his season-long rival, Nottinghamshire’s Samit Patel.
Ali hit 2,016 runs in all forms of cricket this year, took 52 wickets at an economy rate of 4.07 and pouched 26 catches. His total of 1,373 runs in the County Championship was the most by any batsman.
England all-rounder Patel had regained the lead in early September and looked to have secured victory after taking three wickets in nine balls against Glamorgan in the YB40 Final at Lord’s.
But after hitting 44 off 70 balls in the second innings of Worcestershire’s match against Northants at New Road, Ali then helped skittle his newly-promoted opponents by taking 6-77 – his best return in the Championship this season.
Coupled with the points he gained in the first innings, the performance ensured he earned a total of 38.59 points in the match, finishing with a total of 600 points – seven clear of Patel with a day to go.
Patel then scored 29 off 66 balls on the final morning against Somerset at Trent Bridge, leaving him needing one top order wicket (worth five points) in the afternoon to secure victory.
But despite his Notts team mates gathering round the bat for 11 overs he was unable to do so before the two teams settled on a draw, leaving Ali to record the narrowest margin of victory since the inception of the FTI MVP Award in 2007.
Jason Ratcliffe, Assistant Chief Executive of the Professional Cricketers’ Association said: “It has been an incredible season for Mo.
Ali’s achievement was all the more laudable given that players in Division Two of the County Championship receive twenty per cent less points than their counterparts in Division One in order to reflect the respective standards.
