Vitality Blast 2024: Chris Wood shows amazing sportsmanship, opts not to run out 'ball-struck Parkinson', video goes viral

Kent and Hampshire locked horns in the South Group game of the ongoing Vitality Blast 2024 on Sunday. Hampshire won the game by 3 wickets. Apart from Hampshire’s win, what attracted the eyeballs was an amazing gesture from the star Hampshire pacer Chris Wood towards Kent’s lower-order batter Matt Parkinson in the first innings of the match.

The incident happened in the first innings when Matt Parkinson was at the non-striker end around the end of Kent’s innings. Chris Wood was bowling in the last over of the match when Joey Evison was on the strike. Subsequently, Evison happened to play a straight shot that struck Parkinson who had already covered a bit of ground to run for a single. But after getting struck by the ball, Parkinson fell in the middle of the pitch.

The Hampshire pacer Chris Wood had enough chance and time to run Parkinson out at the non-striker’s end but the former came up with an incredible gesture as he opted to not execute this ‘run-out’ against the Kent batter.

The video of this brilliant gesture from the 33-year-old pacer is also making rounds on social media as soon as it was shared from the official X handle (formerly Twitter) of the Vitality Blast.

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Here’s the video of Chris Wood’s gesture for Matt Parkinson:

Impeccable sportsmanship 👏



Matt Parkinson is struck by the ball, and Chris Wood chooses not to run him out 🫡 pic.twitter.com/RijvNEpqWi

— Vitality Blast (@VitalityBlast) June 2, 2024

Speaking of the action of the match between Kent and Hampshire and Kent, the latter won the toss and opted to bat first. Batting first, Sam Billings & co. posted a total of 165 runs for the loss of 9 wickets in the allotted 20 overs to set a target of 166 runs for Hampshire to chase in the second innings.

For Hampshire, Chris Wood bowled an amazing as he scalped 2 wickets at the cost of just 19 runs in his quota of 4 overs. Alongside him, James Fuller, Benny Howell, and Liam Dawson also bagged 2 wickets each, with John Turner picking 1 wicket.

While chasing the target, Hampshire managed to chase down the total in 19.5 overs, scoring 166 runs for the loss of 7 wickets and winning the match by a narrow margin of 3 wickets.

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