England pacer David Willey is known for keeping batsmen under pressure by bowling tight line and length deliveries in the white-ball cricket games. Willey was arguably the most unfortunate cricketer as he missed out on England’s Cricket World Cup 2019 squad due to the English selection committee picking another deadly fast bowler Jofra Archer in the squad.
However, The 31-year-old Willey is making a comeback on the international side once again as he has been included in the limited-overs format squad against Team Sri Lanka which will start from June 23. Willey played a huge role in renovating England’s One Day International set-up under the skipper Eoin Morgan when the England team was going through a rough patch.
In 2016 during the time of the ICC T20 World Cup which was hosted by India, a few teams got an opportunity to warm them up and play practice games against Indian domestic teams. England faced Mumbai Cricket Association XI, due to the team looking weak against the brilliant England side they mixed things up and added 4 players including Adil Rashid, David Willey, Jos Buttler, and James Vince on the Mumbai side to make things balanced.
That match took place in Brabourne stadium. Eoin Morgan as always got lucky with the toss and elected to bat first by invited Willey and the team to open the bowling.
David Willey dismissed his 4 England teammates
Eoin Morgan and company scored a bunch of runs and ended their innings at the score of 177, but the thing which got even more attention than this huge score was, Left-arm pacer David Willey’s final three bowls in the game as he managed to get a memorable hat-trick by scalping the wickets of his international teammates Joe Root, Moeen Ali and Chris Jordan. The most important dismissal was of current red ball captain of England Joe Root as he was at the score of 48 and would have scored more runs for the team.
Moeen Ali replaced Root but got out on the bouncer by the lefty and Jordan was dismissed when he tried to hit a shot over the deep cover. Everybody was impressed with the Sensational hat-trick and the crowd present on the ground got cheers.
Even with Willey’s remarkable performance with the ball, Mumbai Cricket Association XI lost the match as they fell 14 runs short while chasing 177 runs. Willey went on to have a very good T20I World Cup tournament as he picked 10 wickets in the tournament helping England being the runner ups in the competition.