Southern Brave knocked Oval Invincibles out of The Hundred with a 4-ball win at the Ageas Bowl.

The result means that only Trent Rockets retain a theoretical hope of pipping Welsh Fire to the final knockout qualification spot – Rockets need to win their final match well, and hope that Fire lose both their remaining games badly, to snatch 3rd place in the ladder.

At a packed-out Ageas Bowl (official attendance, measured at the innings break in the women’s game, was over 10,000) Brave got off to the perfect start, with Lauren Bell and Anya Shrubsole removing openers Lauren Winfield-Hill and Alice Capsey within the first 10 balls.

It was left to Suzie Bates and Marizanne Kapp to try to rebuild, and they leveraged all the experience of their collective 512 international caps to take Invincibles to 51 without further loss at the half-way stage.

51-2 at the half-way mark is still some way short of a good score, but it was a platform that allowed Invincibles to subsequently accelerate, with Paige Scholfield hitting a rapid 30 off 17 balls, driving a big late-middle phase which begat 43 runs.

Brave’s bowlers pulled things back a little bit at the death, but Invincibles 130-6 was nonetheless a decent total, slightly in excess of a typical score in this competition, and especially impressive in the light of where they had been.

Brave’s formidable top-order all struggled today – Maia Bouchier laboured to 22 off 25 balls, as if shackled down by the weight of expectations after both Danni Wyatt and Smriti Mandhana had been dismissed cheaply. Brave reached the 50-ball mark neck-and-neck with where Invincibles had been, on 52-2 where Invincibles had been 51-2; and they proceeded to slip further behind, going at little more than a run a ball through to the 70th ball.

It needed something special to get Brave over the line, and it was provided by Freya Kemp, who had made just 7 runs in the tournament before today, and had been dismissed for consecutive ducks in her last two visits to the middle. Kemp defied that form, smashing a commanding 41 off just 21 balls, finishing it off with a 6 off the 96th delivery. With Georgia Adams also hitting her best score of the comp – an unbeaten 50 – at the other end, Brave were home and dry.

With the announcement by England this week that they are planning to play Kemp as a pure batter against Sri Lanka next month, there could hardly have been a better time for her to recover her mojo with the blade, leading her side to a win which puts them in the driving seat now to qualify directly for their third Hundred final, and perhaps this time actually win the thing!