Former England all-rounder Ravi Bopara signs up for Steelbacks Blast stint

The hard-hitting all-rounder has put pen to paper on a one-year deal to play for Northants in this summer's Vitality T20 Blast.

The 38-year-old Londoner signs on at the County Ground after finishing a four-year white ball stint at Sussex, skippering the south coast team in the past two Blast seasons.

He had previously spent 18 years plying his trade at Essex, and is a regular in the franchise white ball cricket scene around the globe, having regularly played in the Indian Premier League, the Big Bash League, the Pakistan Super League and many more tournaments.

He has most recently been a team-mate of Steelbacks skipper David Willey in the International League T20, the pair playing for the Abu Dhabi Knight Riders.

Bopara has a wealth of experience, paricularly in white ball cricket, with the list of clubs he has played for on his Cricinfo page currently numbering 25!

Bopara also enjoyed a lengthy international career with England between 2007 and 2015, playing 13 Tests, 38 T20 internationals and 120 one day internationals.

In last summer's Blast, although Sussex failed to reach the last eight, Bopara was the Sharks' top scorer with 408 runs at an average of 37 with a strike-rate of 146.

In T20 cricket, Bopara has scored more than 9,800 runs at an average of around 28, and has also claimed just shy of 300 wickets in the 500 T20 matches he has played in his career.

Bopara, who won the T20 Blast with Essex in 2019, has signed an an initial one-year T20 only contract at the County Ground, and is set to make his Northants debut when the Steelbacks host Derbyshire Falcons in their T20 Blast opener on May 30.