A brilliant spin bowling performance, on an admittedly helpful pitch, set Sri Lanka up for only their third ever win on English soil, and their first against England, having previously beaten Pakistan in the 2009 and 2017 World Cups.

The hybrid pitch at Chelmsford, which contains threads of plastic sewn into the surface to give the natural grass a helping hand, offered just enough grip and turn to bamboozle England’s batters, who collapsed into a black hole of embarrassment. It could have been even worse too, if only Sri Lanka could have fielded quite as well as they bowled – Dani Gibson and Amy Jones were both dropped, and Charlie Dean should have been run out on 7 after a horrible mix-up with Gibson. Honestly… England were lucky to get to 100.

Dean did at least capitalise on her good fortune – she took on the bowling and hit 34 off 26 balls. There is definitely more to come from Dean with the bat, and she showed today that she can go at a decent strike rate – this was her highest strike rate in an innings for England, and it put the rest of the performance in a little perspective.

We’ve long thought that the problem with Jon-ball (like it’s male counterpart, Baz-ball) was that it was always going to implode at some point, but it didn’t even do that today – batters weren’t being caught bravely on the boundary, but meekly on the ring – England collapsed not with a bang, but with a whimper.

It goes without saying that 104 barely registers against a “typical” score in T20 internationals between the ICC Championship sides these days – this was England’s worst day out against anyone but Australia in more than 10 years, during which time T20 cricket has undergone an unrecognisable transformation, with 138 being par these days.

England were then forced to play the role of spectators as Chamari Athapaththu took charge – 55 runs at a strike rate of 177 , with eight 4s, two 6s. It’s not often you see the ball literally hit out of the ground these days. Athapaththu did it not once, but twice – a smashing performance in every sense!

That 67-run powerplay really settled the game – with 6 overs done, the required rate was less than 3 an over, and Sri Lanka knew they could just wait for the bad balls… which… well… talking of…

England really didn’t help themselves by selecting Issy Wong, who they know has issues with her run-up, and then asking her to bowl two overs when they were defending a very low total. Everyone who has seen Wong play in domestic cricket in England this year knows she isn’t right – she has been reduced to a bit-part role at Sparks, and she was dropped by Birmingham Phoenix, with Phoenix and New Zealand coach Ben Sawyer proclaiming that he was going to fix her. Well… he didn’t. She began with a front-foot no-ball… then bowled another two balls later… then another… then a wide, as the over went for 12 freebies.

Heather Knight then brought Wong on again at the end, almost as if she was trying to complete her humiliation, and sure enough she conceded another 12 as Vishmi Gunaratne treated her with the disdain her performance honestly deserved. With the WBBL draft tomorrow, Wong could not have picked a worse time to have a match like this; but I’m going to say it – if anyone picks her, England should not let her go. She needs to go back to the drawing board, and she can’t do that jetting around the globe in franchise cricket. She won’t like it, but it’s surely her last chance to save her career, rather than burning out at 21.

By the end, Fortress Chelmsford  had been reduced to rubble, with the crowd openly jeering a visibly embarrassed England, most of whom looked like they wanted to follow those 6s from Chamari – out of the ground and far away.

Odds are that England will still win the series in Derby next week, but they have learned a bitter lesson here today. England treated these games as warm-ups – a chance to give players time in the middle. They underestimated Sri Lanka, and it came back to bite them. Hard.

England won a very rain-affected match in Hove by 12 runs – a margin that sounds much closer than it actually was, as the Sri Lankans thrashed 17 runs off Kate Cross’s final over in what was by that point a hopeless cause.

With heavy rain having fallen for much of the afternoon, it was a miracle they got on at all, initially losing just 3 overs per innings from the delayed start, as the ground staff worked the super-sopper harder than Sophie Ecclestone’s shoulder in a Test match.

In her new opening role, Maia Bouchier looked slightly subdued, but still contributed a healthy 22 off 18; whilst at the other end Danni Wyatt perhaps read the conditions a bit better, choosing to stroke and guide the ball, rather than trying to hammer the leather off it – even her huge 6 into the parking lot behind the Sharks stand was more of a lift than a smash.

Between them, Wyatt and Bouchier took an undefeated 11-an-0ver 55 off the foreshortened 5-over powerplay to put England in a very healthy position, though both were lost shortly after – Bouch run out by a decent bit of fielding and Wyatt smartly bowled by Inoka Ranaweera with a slightly late-career Jenny Gunn-ish whiff of a delivery.

This set the stage for England’s young guns to… in the immortal words of George Michael… “go for it” with Freya Kemp and Alice Capsey (combined age… younger than me!) both impressing – Kemp returning a strike rate of 200 for her 20, and Capsey not far behind – a strike rate of 189 as she passed 50 for the third time in an England shirt.

21 of Capsey’s 51 runs came in a single over, as Ranaweera felt the full force of Capsey’s bat, with members of the crowd being forced to take evasive action on no less than 3 occasions as for a brief while it rained sixes rather than rain!

186 is a pretty massive total. Adjusted for the lost overs, a score of 117 is typical in T20s between the ICC Championship teams – so we are talking about something like 70 runs over par; and there was absolutely no chance of Sri Lanka chasing it. The required rate was already almost 12 an over when further heavy rain threatened to deny England victory, with the game 11 balls short of a result. We were ready to give up, and a fair few members of the crowd actually did; but the weather softened just enough to get the players back on, though the groundsmen were doubtless looking on in horror at the potential for damage to the square.

It wasn’t an easy bowling situation for England. Mahika Gaur had to complete her 2nd over, though that did allow her to pick up a maiden wicket of Chamari Athapaththu – not a bad scalp for your first on debut. It is difficult to pass judgement on such a truncated opportunity for the 17-year-old, but she showed why she has potential – great action, good pace, and a fantastic appeal – and England will certainly want to see more of her in this series.

Charlie Dean was tasked with a tricky penultimate over with a wet ball, with half an eye on the skies as rain threatened again, but she delivered with her customary reliability – conceding just 6, to basically ensure that England would win the game and take a 1-0 lead in the series to a sold-out Fortress Chelmsford at the weekend.

Southern Brave won The Hundred at the third time of asking, as Rhianna Southby capped-off a dream August with another brilliant performance behind the stumps as Superchargers slumped to 105 all out in the showpiece final at Lord’s.

It seems barely plausible now that Southby was dropped by Southern Vipers (coached by… er… Brave coach Charlotte Edwards) earlier in the summer for the entirety of the Lottie Cup – she didn’t play a single game in the regional T20 comp, with Vipers continuing to prefer Aussie import Nicole Faltum.

And to be fair, there was some logic to the decision – Vipers were struggling for runs in the early part of the season, and Southby is not a batter – she was carded to come in at 10 today, and was only that high Lauren Bell’s reputation precedes her as a ‘Genuine No. 11’. Southby had also arrived at Vipers over the winter with something of a rap sheet for making a lot of basic errors due to lapses in concentration – a reputation she didn’t quite dispel playing in the RHF Trophy at the dawn of the summer.

So it is probably safe to say that she wasn’t top of the list in many people’s fantasy picks when it came to selecting a wicket keeper for The Hundred.

But the one thing Southby has always had in spades however is moxie – even in her early days at Surrey, she was always the one person she could depend on to believe in herself – so whilst back at the start of August no one else might have imagined she would be lifting that big ‘H’ today, you can bet your life that she did.

Brave v Superchargers was the key turning-point – not the game today, but the one that took place back at the start of the comp, on August 6th at the Ageas Bowl. Southby took 2 catches and 2 stumpings, dismissing 4 of Superchargers top 5, earning herself a Match Hero medal – a rare feat for a wicket-keeping performance. Suddenly people were looking at her differently – talking about her as a possible successor to Amy Jones.

That may or may not come to be – it is a big call for an international side to consider picking a specialist keeper who can’t bat in the top 6 – but if there was any doubt that in terms of pure keeping, that Southby is the best we have right now below England, that was dispelled this afternoon.

During yesterday’s abandoned semi-final eliminator, we had lightning in the skies over The Oval; but here we had lightning behind the sticks at Lord’s, as Southby pulled off 3 smart stumpings to break the back of the Superchargers’ middle order, including the wicket of rival “Future England Keeper” Bess Heath, who landed on her behind both literally and metaphorically trying to beat Soutby’s glovework.

The other crucial role today for Brave was played once again by Danni Wyatt, as it had been in Viper’s Lottie Cup win earlier in the season. After a start which definitely wasn’t what they’d have wanted – losing both Smriti Mandhana and Maia Bouchier cheaply, there were just echoes of Brave’s collapses in the two previous Hundred finals.

It left Wyatt with a lot of responsibility on her shoulders, and she had to rein in her game just a little during the front half of the innings, but in the late middle phase she opened up and it was the period that decisively  turned the game in Brave’s favour as the strike rate hit its highest heights at a ground where big scores have proved somewhat elusive.

One can only wonder what the final score would have been if Wyatt hadn’t been taken out by one of the unluckier dismissals we’ve seen of late – run out at the non-strikers end after a Georgia Adams drive rebounded off Wyatt’s glove and straight to Kate Cross who took the gift presented, thank you very much!

Some late hitting from Freya Kemp, which wasn’t pretty but was pretty effective, got Brave up to 139, and left Superchargers with work to do, but it wasn’t an insurmountable total. At least… it wasn’t until Southby got involved.

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!

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.