KSL SEMI-FINAL – Stars v Storm: Talking Points

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The Toss

Heather Knight described it as “a good toss to lose”, no doubt aware that – as Hypocaust pointed out before play began – Storm have only batted first twice in all KSL games, and both times they lost. It was a scrabble, but they retained that record today. Stars, who seem to be reasonably confident both chasing and setting a total, might therefore have been better off putting their opponents in.

Claire Nicholas

Stars might be able to rip through their opponents with an all-international bowling attack, but this tournament is also about discovering new talent, and there’s only one non-international who has opened the bowling for her side every single match this tournament: Claire Nicholas.* Today her captain, Heather Knight, showed the ultimate faith in giving her 4 straight powerplay overs, which went for just 14 runs. The Huddleston Experiment might not have worked – the Nicholas one certainly has.

Stafanie Taylor

Taylor had a miserable World Cup and that’s been followed by a fairly miserable Super League. Nonetheless, when her side needed her the most she did finally deliver, hitting 37* to take them over the line when at one stage they absolutely did look dead in the water. Even more impressively Taylor played in a way that isn’t her natural T20 game – acting as anchorwoman rather than bish bash boshing it around. Before today she had scores of 8, 34, 4 and 0 in the group games – all is now forgiven!

Batting Breadth

What we’ve seen in Super League is actually similar in some ways to what we see in the Women’s County Championship: once a side is 3 or 4 wickets down, they tend to struggle with the bat. That was true of both sides today, with the “big” stars dismissed early on – for Stars none of Tammy Beaumont, Lizelle Lee, Marizanne Kapp or Nat Sciver went on to make a big score; and Storm then found themselves 17-4 in the 4th over. It was just fortunate for Storm that Georgia Hennessy kept a calm head on her shoulders. Basically what this match proves is that a side that can – genuinely – bat deep will win most of their games, most of the time.

* To be fair to her, Linsey Smith did open the bowling for Vipers in 4 out of 5 group games, but missed the last match due to illness.

2 thoughts on “KSL SEMI-FINAL – Stars v Storm: Talking Points”

  1. Odd thing about Stafanie Taylor this season is that Storm have batted her at #4. She opened in every innings last season as she did for Sydney Thunder in WBBL. For the West Indies she’s batted below #3 less than 10 times across both ODI & T20I.

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  2. I think the toss and Stars batting first played to both sides’ strengths. Stars have appeared, at least before the semi to be better when batting first. 3 of their 4 victories in the group stage came defending, and their 1 from 2 chasing record included reaching a target of a mere 101 and getting bowled out for 90. They clearly looked better when defending.

    Unfortunately for them they ended up 20 runs short of a defendable score (and Storm are the best chasing team). Dunkley played well but too few got in and scored quickly. Beaumont looked short of form after quite a good start to KSL. Having said that Nicholas did bowl very well.

    Stars put in a decent effort in the field but they had so few runs to play with that any little partnership for Storm would set them up as favourites, and so it proved. Stage was set for a rerun of last year’s final!

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