HE has won five trophies in the last six seasons with Hampshire, but it is an early-season County Championship match that still reduces Jimmy Adams to tears.

As Hampshire’s captain prepares to launch his benefit year, he reveals the dramatic two-wicket win against Nottinghamshire in 2010 still makes him emotional.

Hampshire were enduring their worst start to a season for 104 years, after losing nine of their first ten games (they drew the other) when they arrived at Trent Bridge in May.

Needing 281 to beat the eventual champions, they were heading for another defeat when they slipped to 225-8.

Then Neil McKenzie was joined by Sri Lanka’s Rangana Herath. McKenzie finished on 115 – the first of his seven Championship hundreds for the county – as Hampshire won a thriller.

Adams recalls: “We hadn’t won a game for eight weeks, somehow we kept managing to lose after playing good cricket.

“Then we went to Trent Bridge.”

Adams had made 96 and 21.

“I was sat next to Chris Benham who was like a cat on a hot tin roof! I had to tell him to go away, I just couldn’t deal with it.

“I said ‘Mac knows what he’s doing, he’ll find a way. He did. He swept Andre Adams with that paddle sweep of his over fine-leg and the changing room went bonkers.

“The relief and emotion was ridiculous!

“I rang home, mum answered and I went into jelly mode. I couldn’t say anything without thinking I was going to cry.

“It sounds really stupid. I remember mum going ‘are you ok?’ and me going ‘yeah, I really am’.”

Even recalling that win brings back the emotion.

“Just thinking about it makes me cry!” laughs Adams. “It was an emotional overload and suddenly it came together.

“It was complete euphoria. I remember sitting there thinking ‘it’s just a Championship win in May, it shouldn’t be like this!’ “There are times when I felt like I’ve been allowed to cry, like winning at Lord’s, but that was the one game that got to me purely because of the graft everyone had put in.

“You feel like a bit of a wally but that was after two months of really hard graft.

“There wasn’t a reason for losing. Everyone was doing the right thing but it just wasn’t happening. Then it did and ‘woah!’ That was the start of the McKenzie legend.”

With the shackles off, Adams made the first limited-overs hundred hundred of his career, against Warwickshire at Edgbaston two days later.

His batting would inspire Hampshire to their first T20 title later that season, which was also the most prolific of his Championship career.

Jimmy Adams, who launches his benefit year tonight, reflects on the Shane Warne years and reveals the biggest influences on his career in this weekend’s Sports Pink.