It’s all coming together for Northants skipper Wakely

The Steelbacks captain, who notched his maiden century in List A cricket, led his side to their third consecutive Yorkshire Bank 40 victory on Sunday with a 29-run defeat of Kent at Tunbridge Wells.

And coming on the back of the twin Bank Holiday victories over Worcestershire and Warwickshire, it has placed the County in a decent position in the Group A standings as they head into the second half of their fixture list.

In the three wins, Wakely’s side have come out on top in the crunch parts of the contests and he feels this has played a key part in the transformation.

He said: “We’ve been learning how to win and the crucial moments in the game, we’ve been winning those.

“Last year we lost all of them and that meant we weren’t winning games, but that’s gradually been turning around.”

And he acknowledged that the performance at Tunbridge Wells was more complete than the previous week’s efforts which contained a few flaws

He added: “In the other wins we played parts of the game really well but not others.

“We didn’t really get any partnerships going in those games but we had a couple of good stands against Kent with two batsmen going on to get big scores which is what we’ve been aiming to do.”

One surprising aspect of the weekend’s contest was that, after winning the toss, Kent asked the County to bat first on a ground that generally has a good pitch and is quick scoring.

But Wakely admitted that he wasn’t really taken aback by his opposite number’s decision.

“When we did our research we found out that they’ve won seven of nine games batting second, so we thought that would be what they’d do,” he said.

“We were always going to bat first as that’s how we’ve won our games so we almost knew what we’d be doing before we turned up.”

The County have a weekend without a YB40 fixture coming up with their next action being against Sussex in Arundel on June 16.