YORKSHIRE Vikings held both their nerve and their catches to beat Derbyshire Falcons by one run in their NatWest T20 Blast match at the County Ground yesterday.

The win moves Alex Lees’s side up to fifth in the North Group table and it seems that the Vikings are playing their best short-form cricket at just the right time to press their claims for a quarter-final place.

But on a day when Yorkshire batsmen had posted a competitive 166-6 in their 20 overs and the fielders backed up the bowlers with a faultless display of catching in the outfield, it was still the Yorkshire spinners who turned the game.

Player of the match Adil Rashid took 3-20 from his four overs and off-spinner Azeem Rafiq backed him up with figures of 1-28.

Rafiq’s display was all the more praiseworthy considering that he bowled the last over of the powerplay and also the final six balls of the innings, when the Falcons needed just 13 runs to win.

However, the spinner dismissed Alex Hughes and then ran out Shiv Thakor off his own bowling to seal the win, despite the fact that Matt Critchley whacked a six off the last ball of the innings to make the margin of victory seem even closer than it was

“Adil Rashid is world class but I thought Azeem Rafiq was outstanding, too,” said the Yorkshire coach Jason Gillespie.

“It takes some nerve for a finger spinner to bowl in the powerplay and also in the last over of the innings and I think it shows how far Azeem has come in a very short time.

“Kane Williamson was outstanding with the bat and they put us under pressure but I thought that the way we applied ourselves with the ball and in the field was excellent.”

Gillespie also acknowledged that it had been a close run thing after Hamish Rutherford’s 44, Neil Broom’s 37 and Chesney Hughes’s 35 had kept Derbyshire in the hunt throughout their innings.

One or two Yorkshire seamers came in for some rough treatment but David Willey’s two wickets included the vital scalp of Hughes in the penultimate over of the match.

Earlier in the afternoon Yorkshire’s innings had progressed fitfully against some good bowling but the White Rose eventually posted a perfectly respectable score off their twenty overs.

Asked to bat first, the Vikings lost Adam Lyth in the fifth over and Alex Lees for a first-ball duck four balls later.

However, Willey had already begun in compelling style by taking a four and successive sixes off Jimmy Neesham’s first over.

And he and Kane Williamson had taken the score to 80 before the England all-rounder perished for a 28-ball 33 when he was caught by Wayne Madsen at long off, Wes Durston being the successful bowler.

By then, though, Williamson was already moving smoothly through the gears and much of the rest of the innings was dominated by the New Zealander’s batting. He eventually made 65 off 45 balls and Tim Bresnan’s 24 not out gave the innings a late flourish.

But neither Williamson nor Jack Brooks are in the White Rose squad for today’s County Championship match against Surrey.

Given Williamson’s schedule it has been decided he should miss the game while Brooks is suffering a slight stiffness in his quad muscle.