George Munsey, the Scotland opener, is heading to Vitality Blast Finals Day on Saturday but has already won one T20 title since joining Nottinghamshire in May.
Such is the life of the itinerant franchise cricketer that during the mid-season break in the Blast's fixture list, when the counties played two rounds of four-day cricket, Munsey hopped over to Belgium to play in the EUT20, a pop-up league in Belgium. His team, Ghent Gladiators, won the inaugural title, then he returned to the East Midlands to resume his prolific Blast season with Notts.
Munsey's nomadic career is hardly unique but has seen both the good and the bad of the recent explosion in the number of short-form leagues. Regulations often encourage teams to pick players from Associate nations and Munsey has jumped at almost every opportunity going to broaden his horizons and learn from a new set of team-mates and coaches.
But he also knows that it is not always as simple as that. Last year, he was in the Cayman Islands when a league collapsed mid-season; in January, when he arrived in Kuala Lumpur, it quickly became apparent that the inaugural Pro10 Malaysia was not going to get off the ground as planned. Late payments and financial insecurity are a fact of life.
"I went to Malaysia and it was obvious that things weren't going to be going ahead," Munsey tells Cricinfo. "But I went and made the most of my three days there before the [T20] World Cup. I was training every day, I had three coaches - who were bored - slinging at me on these brand new, fresh grass nets. You just have to make the most of these opportunities and situations.
"It's the nature of the beast. You get a phone call, and you've got to be ready to go. You could land somewhere and play the same day… The downside is that it can be last-minute. Very few players get the luxury of going, 'Oh, I'm going to play in this, this and this in the next six months, and have a rest here,' because that's just not the nature of the work."
In October, Munsey played in the National Cricket League, a little-known T10 tournament in Dallas, where he got to know Notts head coach Peter Moores, who was coaching another team. "I started talking to him about my cricket, and where I wanted to take it," Munsey recalls. "We had a few coffees in the mornings." Soon after, Notts offered him a deal for the Blast.
It has proved to be a masterstroke: Munsey's 488 runs - with five half-centuries in 13 innings - make him the third-highest run-scorer in the tournament heading into Finals Day on Saturday. He qualifies as a local player, and hopes that his success will convince counties to give further opportunities to his Scotland team-mates in future.
He has done the heavy lifting in an opening partnership with Joe Clarke, Notts' captain, who is averaging 18.46. "He plays the game on the front foot, which I love," Munsey says. "We haven't fired at the same time yet. I'm really hopeful that that's going to come out on Finals Day. If that happens, we're going to be pretty hard to stop."
Munsey's success begs the question why he had only played seven games in the Blast before this season - five for Hampshire, two for Kent - but he has benefitted from Scotland's sparse fixture list. "This has been one of the few summers where there's no clashes," he says. "We're very attractive for counties as Scottish players if we're available for the full season."
Yet ideally, Munsey and his Scotland team-mates would prefer to be playing international cricket instead. "The fixture list isn't amazing," he says. "We'd love it to be better." As an Associate nation, Scotland only rarely play major opposition outside of ICC events; earlier this week, Munsey was indignant to learn of the changes to the format of the next 50-over World Cup.
"It'll come as absolutely no surprise that the ICC hasn't looked after anyone outside the top three," he says. "We all have a responsibility in this game to keep growing it… You want your World Cups - that are probably very pivotal to the ICC - to be global and not be the same teams turning up over and over again. It sounds like another backward step.
"But I just turn up and try to win every game. That's the key thing that I keep stressing to frustrated Associate cricketers: our voices never get heard normally, but one thing we can do is control what we can on the pitch and win games of cricket. There will be opportunities to make some upsets, and hopefully one of the big teams get to feel the agony of missing out on a World Cup through the way the ICC structures it."
For now, Munsey's focus is on Saturday at Edgbaston, with Notts due to play Hampshire in the second semi-final and chasing a record-equalling third title later in the day. The Blast has been England's secondary short-form tournament since the Hundred launched in 2021, but Finals Day remains the occasion that every county cricketer targets at the start of the season.
"You want to play in the big moments, and Finals Day has been that for English domestic cricket for quite some time," he says. "It's very exciting. The group deserves it… It's been very easy to fit in, and that goes a long way. I'm very pleased with the way I started off the season and the way it's carried on. Now it's time to get to the business end and try to do some more damage."