Middlesex won the Twenty20 Cup because they were able to bind together a band of lost souls, wandering spirits, new kids and a hard-bitten mercenary. Drop in Owais Shah for a touch of class on finals day on Saturday and it was a heady mixture. Middlesex were not a team of star names, they were a team of itinerants wrapped around a core of stalwarts, equipped to win this competition, like some cricketing A-Team.

This is likely to be the Twenty20 way as teams come together for big tournaments. The Rajasthan Royals, won the Indian Premier League (IPL) despite assembling an unheralded squad. Twenty20 Finals Day followed a similar pattern. Durham, the favourites on the day, deflated spectacularly against Middlesex in their semi-final.

Kent, last season’s champions, managed to utilise their South Africans and Pakistanis to great effect and it took a special performance by Middlesex in the final to beat them. Azhar Mahmood and Yasir Arafat showed why they are peerless finishers with the ball in one-day cricket and Robert Key, the Kent captain, and Joe Denly could be a better opening partnership than any England have tried in recent times in limited-overs cricket.

In the final, all results were possible with one ball remaining. With 16 needed off the final over Justin Kemp required three runs off the last ball to earn a tie for Kent. In the event Tyron Henderson bowled a yorker to give Middlesex victory by three runs. It was a fitting result after Shah had scored 75 from 35 balls in helping Middlesex score 187 for six, the highest total in a Twenty20 Cup final.

Middlesex, who had not won a trophy since claiming the County Championship in 1993 and have not won a one-day crown since the Refuge Assurance League in 1992, struggled at the beginning of the season before Ed Smith, their captain, suffered a misdiagnosed broken ankle after their second Twenty20 match that enabled Ed Joyce to lead the team.

“Ed Joyce captained really well right throughout the tournament,” Shah said. “Great credit goes to him for being calm right throughout the day. He got the players playing for him.”

Trophies do not make everyone friends, but they bind the ambitious and Joyce and Shah, out of contract, as good as pledged their futures to Middlesex yesterday.

Shaun Udal was the most economical bowler on finals day and played a vital role for Middlesex conceding less than five an over from his eight overs.

The 39-year-old retired from the game at the end of last summer after almost 20 seasons with Hampshire, but was lured back with a two-year contract by Middlesex.

The off spinner, who played for England in 2006, was going to spend the winter selling cricket equipment and doing some after-dinner speaking. Now he will be flying to Antigua with Middlesex at the end of October for the Stanford Super Series and before that possibly heading somewhere east for the Champions League.

“I have shares in a company making cricket helmets and I was going to be working for them selling helmets to clubs and shops,” Udal said.

“That was the aim but that’s all been put on the back burner now. Who knows what the future holds - I could be the oldest IPL cricketer if anyone is interested. I retired because I didn’t think anybody else wanted me. I’d agreed to play at Henley-on-Thames, so I’d have been playing there today.

“But I kept waking up thinking I’ve done the wrong thing. Middlesex and a couple of other counties made offers. I would never have thought back in February that I could have been back here [at the Rose Bowl], but it just goes to show age is no barrier if you are still producing the goods.”

In a different way, Murali Kartik has also been a lost soul. The 31-year-old left-arm spinner is known as “The Nearly Man” in India, having been in and out of the India side ten times as Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh are the preferred spinners.

Kartik has formed perhaps the vital partnership in Middlesex’s Twenty20 campaign. He roared in celebration when he deceived Key, who had just taken eleven off Udal’s first over, to turn the final Middlesex’s way.

Henderson, aka The Blacksmith for reasons that are obvious when you see him wield his bat as he did on Saturday, was an even later addition to the squad than Udal. Henderson said Middlesex rang him up in May, a month before the start of the competition.

The 33-year-old, who has played for seven clubs, hit nine sixes and six fours in two explosive innings on Saturday. “I never want to be captaining a side when Tyron Henderson is batting,” Key said.

Durham needed to be braver against Middlesex in the day’s second semi-final and should have moved Shaun Pollock, the former South Africa all-rounder, up the order to accelerate the top order’s pedestrian rate of scoring. It is what Middlesex have done with Henderson all season.

Twenty20 Cup Final

Kent v Middlesex
Southampton (Middlesex won toss): Middlesex beat Kent by three runs

Middlesex
B A Godleman b Yasir Arafat 1
*E C Joyce c G O Jones b Cook 23
T Henderson c Key b McLaren 43
O A Shah b McLaren 75
E J G Morgan c Tredwell b Azhar Mahmood 23
D J Malan not out 6
S D Udal b Yasir Arafat 1
†B J M Scott not out 6
Extras (b 5, lb 1, w 3) 9

Total (6 wkts, 20 overs) 187

T J Murtagh, M Kartik and D P Nannes did not bat.

Fall of wickets: 1-19, 2-47, 3-83, 4-162, 5-173, 6-179.

Bowling: Yasir Arafat 4-0-20-2; Azhar Mahmood 4-0-33-1; McLaren 4-0-36-2; Cook 4-0-35-1; Tredwell 2-0-27-0; Stevens 2-0-30-0.

Kent
J L Denly c Godleman b Udal 31
*R W T Key c Scott b Kartik 52
J M Kemp run out 49
Yasir Arafat run out 1
D I Stevens c Joyce b Nannes 33
Azhar Mahmood not out 6
Extras (lb 6, w 4, nb 2) 12

Total (5 wkts, 20 overs) 184

M van Jaarsveld, R McLaren, †G O Jones, J C Tredwell and S J Cook did not bat.

Fall of wickets: 1-89, 2-91, 3-96, 4-166, 5-184.

Bowling: Murtagh 4-0-32-0; Nannes 4-0-37-1; Henderson 4-0-58-0; Kartik 4-0-30-1; Udal 4-0-21-1.

Umpires: J W Lloyds and N A Mallender.