This week, on the Official Vodcast of the Powerful Women’s Cricket Lobby™:
London Spirit beat Manchester Originals by 8 wickets at Lord’s on Friday, leapfrogging Oval Invincibles into third place courtesy of a superior net run rate.
It means that defending champions Southern Brave are now out of the tournament – which will come as a bit of a shock to anyone used to seeing anything Charlotte Edwards touches turning to gold. It also now looks increasingly likely that it will come down to a battle between Oval Invincibles and London Spirit as to who finishes in third place and thus progresses to the Eliminator – making Sunday’s match between the two at The Oval an effective quarter-final. (We can’t wait!)
Spirit were chasing just 113 after another lacklustre effort with the bat by Originals, but had barely made their way out of the starting block by the halfway point, posting 49 for 2 from their first 50 balls compared to the 48 for 3 which Originals had managed. At that point, Georgia Redmayne was 21* off 31, and had hit just two boundaries – one off the first ball, and one off the 45th – a drought-and-a-half when you’ve only got 100 balls to play with.
In fact, when a caught-and-bowled chance popped out of Fi Morris’s hands, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that the drop was actually a deliberate ploy by the fielding side, who were presumably quite happy to continue bowling at the player who looked to be killing the game. “I dug myself into a little bit of a hole at the start. I was wondering if I should retire myself!” Redmayne said afterwards.
But five balls later, Originals opted to take their strategic timeout, and Redmayne had a moment to gather her breath, and listen to her coaches. The message? “Hold my feet, play good shots, find space, don’t panic.”
She went on to hit 45 from the next 28 balls she faced, and Spirit romped home the winners. Has a strategic timeout ever backfired so spectacularly against the fielding side?
It was just one of a number of decisions which Originals captain Sophie Ecclestone didn’t *quite* get right on Friday – another one being the determination to bowl out seamers Kim Garth, Lauren Filer and Alice Monaghan, leaving Fi Morris with 10 balls in the bank, despite the fact that all five Originals wickets had fallen to spin.
Originals have picked up just two wins from six matches in this tournament so far. There are a number of things that aren’t going to plan – Mooney has scored 92 runs in six innings, averaging just 15; Sophie Molineux never even made it onto the plane after being forced out with a rib fracture; they lost Mahika Gaur at the eleventh hour – but maybe Ecclestone’s captaincy is also one factor in the equation?
This is a bowler who recently enjoyed a record-breaking run of 34 consecutive innings for England taking a wicket (34!!!) And yet so far in this year’s Hundred comp, she’s taken just four wickets. She is ranked 27th if you judge her by the CRICKETher Ranking System (wickets divided by economy), or 23rd, if you use Women’s Cricket Blog’s System. That’s an even bigger issue when you consider that Originals have the worst balls-per-wicket ratio of any team in the comp:
If you’re one of those people who thinks that Ecclestone is the answer to England’s Non-Existent Captaincy Succession Plan, you perhaps need to ask yourself: are you happy to risk that dip in form being replicated on the world stage?
Originals have the best T20 bowler in the world in their ranks (Ecclestone), and one of the best T20 batters in the world (Mooney). And yet they now have just a 1% chance of limping through to the knockout stages. It’s probably fair to say that in 2024 they have proved to be one of those franchise teams whose sum is smaller than its component parts.
This week:
When I walked into the press box before today’s match, the Oval Invincibles media manager mistook me for someone else. I was embarrassed; but perhaps I shouldn’t have been – their socials today suggest he also mistook Oval Invincibles for a cricket team. Now that’s awkward!
Having been put into bat, the Superchargers didn’t get off to the kind of start which suggested they were heading for a huge win. At the halfway point in their innings, they were 62-2, with Phoebe Litchfield and Annabel Sutherland both set, but not exactly motoring. Litchfield remains a little bit of an enigma in short-form cricket – despite the dinks and the sweeps and the ramps, she is far more comfortable playing the kind of booming cover drive with which she opened her account today. She can do the T20 shots all around the ground, but they feel plastic somehow – manufactured rather than her natural game. But having said all that, her natural game is nonetheless so good, that she is able to make T20 work for her regardless, and she was obviously vital today in terms of steadying things after those two early wickets.
Having reached 50 balls with just those two wickets down, Litchfield and Sutherland clearly decided to turn it up a notch, and the acceleration began into a big late middle phase which produced 48 runs at a Strike Rate of 192.
This was probably the key phase of the match, because it turned a middling score into a big one, so although Superchargers slowed down significantly at the death they still ended up on 146, which is right at the top end of a typical total in this competition.
Sutherland finished 63 not out, looking pretty-much as comfortable as it is possible to look in a format that is so relentless; and once again I find myself thinking that what stands Sutherland apart is an incredible work ethic that sees her return to England a better player every summer she comes… and that was even before she got her hands on the ball 45 minutes later!
A very decent total put the pressure on Invincibles batting from the off, and… they cracked big-time, losing a wicket in each of the first 5 sets, to finish the powerplay on 24-5. Lauren Winfield-Hill got a decent ball from Kate Cross; and Kapp was done by an over-optimistic call from Chamari, but everyone else will be wincing when they review the analysis footage, and rightly so.
By the time Amanda-Jade Wellington and Paige Scholfield got together, it was just a question of trying to save some face, and they did what they could, but they obviously weren’t going to go on and win the game from 24-5. And then Sutherland happened for the second time today, taking 4 wickets in 6 balls, with the dastardly tactic of bowling at the stumps – it’ll never catch on!!
The result really opens up the table, with 4 teams on 4 points and one (Superchargers) on 3. It also leaves Southern Brave bottom, which is a new experience for a Charlotte Edwards team; but with there being so little in it, there is still plenty of scope for them to turn things around. The bigger challenge than Edwards’ is on Invincibles coach Jonathan Batty – they were swaggering; now they are staggering. Which way will they go from here?
Welsh Fire beat London Spirit by wrapping up the fourth highest run-chase in the history of The Hundred, reaching their target of 151 with five balls to spare in what was, largely, a one-woman undertaking:
Battling erratic shoelaces, and at one point a shoe which actually flew off as she hared down the pitch, Hayley Matthews finished on 78 not out from 46 balls – Sarah Bryce’s 21 being the next highest contribution.
More importantly, Matthews was there at the end to propel Fire’s chase over the line, turning an unlikely-looking 50 runs off 25 balls into 26 off 15, 16 off 10, and finally a nice-and-relaxing 10 off the last 9, after just clearing the long-on boundary off the 91st ball – the first of Deepti Sharma’s final set.
“If she’s going to lose her shoes but bat like that, who cares? Maybe I’ll try it!” captain Tammy Beaumont said afterwards.
“I’ll teach her how to!” Matthews joked back.
Matthews did get lucky a couple of times – most notably when she pulled a catch to Eva Gray at deep midwicket on 35*; Gray couldn’t quite hang on and ended up parrying it over the rope. But, largely, it was an intelligent innings under pressure, with exactly the right balance between taking enough risks to keep up with the hefty rate, and then dialling it down when that was no longer necessary:
Matthews knows how to manage run-chases single-handedly under extreme pressure – she’s been doing it for West Indies for about a decade – so for Fire it was a case of cometh the hour, cometh the woman.
London Spirit clearly realised she was the key wicket – hence why Georgia Redmayne refused the easy run-out of Phoebe Franklin off the 90th ball, instead opting to attempt to throw down the stumps at the bowler’s end (it was too wayward to have any effect).
A word, too, for Freya Davies’s efforts with the ball, which ensured that Fire did not feel the absence of Shabnim Ismail through injury too acutely. After a tight opening set in which Meg Lanning managed to score just one run from five deliveries, Beaumont’s decision to bring Davies back to bowl balls 41 to 45 proved inspired:
“She’s such a utility bowler, she can bowl at any phase brilliantly,” Beaumont said. “I felt like we let them get away from us a little bit – I wouldn’t normally bring Freya back as early and I just had that gut feel and I had to do it then. For her to come off then so brilliantly really shifted the game.”
Davies removed Heather Knight and Meg Lanning within the space of three balls, and a total which could have been catastrophic proved within reach… just. No doubt there was a certain amount of karmic satisfaction for Davies, who was not just bowling at her former teammates but against the captain who was responsible for her being dropped from England last summer.
Spirit return to Lord’s on Sunday for their top-of-the-table clash against Oval Invincibles: time to see if they can bounce back from what might be a difficult loss to take.
CRICKETher 