65 runs from the bat of Hayley Matthews saw Fire get their Hundred campaign-proper off to a winning start, after their opening match was rained off without a ball bowled on Wednesday.

After her heroics with the bat, Matthews then took the ball for the final death over set, with Brave needing 9 from 5 balls, holding her nerve to restrict Brave to 4 for the loss of 2 wickets, with Chloe Tryon stumped off a wide from the first delivery and Freya Kemp meaninglessly run out off the last.

Matthews has been a feature of English franchise cricket since the first Kia Super League season in 2016, when she appeared for Loughborough Lightning, and has remained a consistent if unspectacular performer ever since; and her outing today was very much that. Her 65 wasn’t one that will live long in the memory – the fans in the stands will probably take home Laura Harris’ 7-ball 20 and Danni Wyatt’s typically swashbuckling 67 – but it did the job, ensuring that Welsh Fire already have more points on the board than they achieved in the entire 2022 Hundred season.

Fire made a decent enough start, with Tammy Beaumont contributing 26 off 17, continuing to show that she remains a very useful batter in domestic short-form cricket, but it was the early middle phase that did the damage as Matthews got into her running, and Harris did what she was brought in to do – play the odds and smash some boundaries.

This put Fire in such a strong position that even a 15 ball slump between balls 55 and 70, where they could barely get the ball off the square, proved survivable; and with Georgia Elwiss getting the better of Vipers teammate Anya Shrubsole in the final set which went for 13, Fire posted a total well above par for this competition – just 1 short of Brave’s own record highest first innings score.

Danni Wyatt might be getting on in years – she is 32 now – but she isn’t showing any sign of slowing down, and she looked the business out in the middle, hitting 67 at a strike rate of 181. At the other end, Smriti Mandhana didn’t look to be quite middling it early on – at the fall of Wyatt’s wicket she was on 27 off 21, at a strike rate of 129; but she then took the initiative, hitting the next 21 balls she faced for 43, at a strike rate of over 200.

Could Smriti have managed the strike better? Possibly – she faced exactly half the deliveries which remained after Wyatt was dismissed, so given her strike rate another 3 balls faced could have won the game for the Brave; but it seems harsh to blame her for the loss when (for example) Chloe Tryon managed to chew-up 10 balls without finding the boundary once.

Sometimes it feels like The Hundred is more about the cricket and the individual performances than it is about the teams, who still feel a little bit “plastic” even in this third season, partly because the draft meant so many big-name moves. In that sense, the fans got their money’s worth this afternoon… even the ones that had come out in green hoping for a different outcome.