'The team's victory means so much'

According to a delighted Ronnie Irani after his all-round heroics at The Oval yesterday, his most memorable moment was his catch out in the deep, which ended the match.

"That catch signalled the victory," said Irani, "and victory was everything. The individual performance is nice, but it is the team's victory that means so much."

Irani's run a ball 53 and his 5 for 56 were career bests for the Essex captain and his performance was all the more remarkable given that he entered the match, his first international one-day game in five years, with a batting average of 15.33 and a bowling average of 81.6 in England games.

"Having the captaincy at Essex has really helped me," he explained. "It has opened up my cricketing brain.

"I am just grateful for the opportunity that I got to play like that for England. I have been out for a while but I have put in a lot of hard work in the last five or six years."

Nasser Hussain paid tribute to his Essex colleague saying: "He will never be a classic bat or a classic bowler, but that only takes you so far, in the end it is the amount of bottle and character that you have, and he has both."