In the final year of the Kia Super League, Jemimah Rodrigues placed 2nd in our KSL Batting Rankings – in the first year of The Hundred, she has gone one louder, topping the table with 249 runs at a Strike Rate of 151. During that 2019 KSL season she started slowly, with scores of 4, 20 and 2, before finding a rich vein of form which included two 50s and a 100. In The Hundred, despite her indifferent recent form for India, she was straight out of the blocks with 92 not out against Welsh Fire, going on to score two further 50s.

Unsurprisingly, with the very best Australians and New Zealanders deciding to pass on The Hundred this year, a cluster of England stars occupy many of the top spots, led by Sophia Dunkley. Since being given a regular spot, and perhaps more importantly a clearly defined role, in the England side, Dunkley looks like a woman who has found a high gear she never knew she had. When I told a group of people at a county match four-or-five years ago that I thought Dunkley would be the next permanent England captain, even her mum looked at me like I was slightly mad. At the beginning of this season, people were still saying the idea was a long call. It doesn’t feel like one now.

The highest ranked non-international is Eve Jones at No. 5. Her success isn’t quite the surprise some seem to think it is – she has 3 County Championship 100s under her belt – and yes, that’s a big number in the old County Championship, mostly played on club pitches with huge boundaries. She also placed 4th in last year’s RHF Batting Rankings. But she has certainly continued to develop her game as one of the older “new” pros, finding the boundary 37 times in the tournament’s group stages – topped only by Jemimah, who did so 42 times.

The other leading non-internationals were Georgia Redmayne, whose performances in The Hundred would have been a factor in her recent call-up to the Australian squad for their series against India… although Cricket Australia were conspicuously careful not to say so in their press release!

And then there is Dani Gibson, who has probably more than anyone else changed the course of her entire life in the last 5 weeks. Previously primarily considered a bowler, whose late teenage years were blighted by serious injury, she has set herself on a new career path as a serious batting allrounder, hitting 108 runs at 180 – the highest Strike Rate of anyone in the top 20. Heather Knight – who usually sticks quite rigidly to established hierarchy – bumped her up the order when Spirit needed quick runs in the final match, and you’d have to say she is now a shoe-in for England’s ‘A’ tour to Australia this winter, which she was probably only on the fringes of selection for a month ago.

Batting Ranking = Runs * Strike Rate

More discussion about The Hundred in this week’s episode:

• Southern Brave qualifying for the final
• Smriti Mandhana replaced by Gaby Lewis
• Raf’s interview with Beth Barrett-Wild (head of the women’s comp)
• The depth of domestic talent on show
• Dilemmas for 2022: scheduling alongside the Commonwealth Games, plus will the ECB persist with double headers?

Oval Invincibles took a big step to qualification for The Eliminator™ with an 8-wicket win over London Spirit in front of a raucous crowd of over 10,000 at The Oval.

Crucially, the 13-ball margin of victory also served to widen the gap in Net Run Rate between them and their closest challengers – Trent Rockets and Northern Superchargers.

In fact, the only way Invincibles can now fail to qualify for The Eliminator™ (it is not really trademarked… but it so ought to be!) is if they lose their final match and both Rockets and Superchargers win theirs, leaving all 3 tied on 9 points.

This would mean that both Superchargers and Rockets would have to overturn Invincibles’ current Net Run Rate advantage. This is certainly possible, but it would need the Invincibles to suffer something of the order of a 30-run defeat to the Brave, with Rockets and Superchargers winning their games (against Originals and Phoenix respectively) by similar margins.

Invincibles v Brave could make for a very interesting final on today’s showing. Brave have been enormous with the bat; but Invincibles won today’s match with a fantastic bowling performance.

Marizanne Kapp, who returned to the side today, is obviously not 100% fit – she looks to be coming in at half pace, and the only ball she bowled today where she shaped-up to come in hard was a total bluff as she bowled Chloe Tryon with a slower ball. But, save an early no ball likely caused by holding back in her run-up, she nonetheless bowled the best bag of 20 balls you’ll likely see in this competition, finishing with figures of 2-12.

Alice Capsey’s 2-15 would have been a Player of the Match (sorry… “Match Hero”) performance on any other day. The ball that bowled Deandra Dottin in particular was a beauty – straightening sharply to take out middle-and-off.

(The fact that neither Capsey nor Kapp were Match Hero – it was Georgia Adams – just goes to show that batters get all the glory and there is no justice for bowlers in this world!)

Spirit weren’t quite as bad as they had been against Brave at Lords earlier in the competition, when they were bowled out for 93, only avoiding total humiliation thanks to a Brave barrel-full of extras. But they were still quite bad. After a slow start, with just 12 runs coming off the first 20 balls, Heather Knight and Tammy Beaumont gave them a platform, taking them to 79 off 60 balls – on course for around 130; but the rest of the batting lineup totally let them down. (If Deepti Sharma wants to be considered as a genuine allrounder at this level in the shorter formats, which she obviously does, she has to do better than 11 off 14 balls.)

Spirit’s 103 was at least 25 under par, and left the Invincibles batters with a pretty easy job to do, to be honest. Of course, it was a job that still needed to be done, but Match Hero Adams, with support from Fran Wilson (who took a while to get going, but delivered in the end) and Kapp with the bat, pulled them home as only she can – mostly in the direction of cow corner!

I was a little disappointed to see Kapp come in ahead of Capsey, but she showed us how its done, and while I don’t always agree with the computer at the ICC that calculates their player rankings, there is a reason Kapp is up there with the likes of Nat Sciver and Ellyse Perry as one of the world’s best allrounders.

The Invincibles know they aren’t there yet – though they could be in The Eliminator™ as soon as Sunday evening if the Originals do them a favour by beating the Rockets. But they are looking increasingly like contenders who can help give this tournament the exciting finish it deserves.

The Women’s Sport Trust have recently repeated their claim that “revenue generated by women’s sport in the UK is set to grow [from £350m] to £1bn a year by 2030” via “ticket, broadcast rights and sponsorship sales”.

Women’s sport is undoubtedly an investment opportunity, but we also need to be realistic, and it is difficult to see where £1bn a year is actually going to come from.

The (Men’s Football) Premier League – the most valuable domestic sports competition in the world outside the United States – has revenues of about £5bn per year.

Barclays’ title sponsorship of the Premier League brings in just £13m per season, and total match-day income is of the order of £500m; so tickets and sponsorship sales won’t get us far towards that £1bn figure, even if we can match the Premier League.

Almost all of the Premier League’s £5bn comes from TV, and realistically that’s the only place where most of our £1bn is coming from too.

But where exactly?

The BBC is under enormous budget pressure; while BT Sport’s investors are rumoured to be getting antsy – so those avenues look closed, at least in terms of getting us anywhere near £1bn.

A “new player” is possible, but Netflix are only interested in subscriber acquisition; while Amazon Prime seem to be mainly focused on a long game of destroying the competition. You can imagine Amazon Prime buying men’s cricket, for example, to damage Sky, but it is difficult to imagine them forking out a lot of cash for “women’s-only” deals.

This leaves the aforementioned Sky. Could they squeeze an extra tenner a month out of all their Sky Sports subscribers to get us to £1bn by 2030? Maybe, but Sky are a pretty tightly run ship, and I think we can be fairly confident they know where their sweet spot is – if there was £650m to be found there, it’s a pretty safe bet they’d have already found it, so any increase in subscription prices would almost certainly be accompanied by a drop in the number of subscribers, with no increase in revenue.

It would be fascinating to know in more detail exactly how the Women’s Sport Trust arrived at the £1bn figure. It is a number that has obviously generated headlines and plenty of discussion on social media about how we might spend this windfall, but we need to be realistic.

Women’s sport is going places – it is an opportunity for growth and the success of The Hundred has shown that it is business worth investing in.

But the focus right now needs to be on the core product – the quality of the sport. Ultimately, if we get the product right, the revenue will take care of itself; and while it might not be £1bn a year, it will be real and sustainable.

So let’s stop chasing rainbows; and start chasing balls instead.

Ireland opener Gaby Lewis looks set to become the first Irish women to play in The Hundred, as she replaces Smriti Mandhana in the Southern Brave squad for the Brave’s last group match against Oval Invincibles and the final, for which the Brave have already qualified.

Smriti Mandhana will fly home from the UK in order to see her family before India’s tour of Australia; while her Indian teammate Harmanpreet Kaur will also fly home immediately, having sustained an injury to her quad. Manchester Originals have opted not to replace Harmanpreet.

Smriti has been an important, but not critical, part of the Brave’s success in qualifying directly for the final with one round of group matches still to come, having scored 167 runs at an average of 128, making her Brave’s third highest run-scorer after Danni Wyatt (188) and Sophia Dunkley (186).

Her replacement, 20-year-old Gaby Lewis – whose sister, father and grandfather all played for Ireland – is an opening batter with 62 caps, and a highest international score of 71, scored against the Netherlands in 2019.

Momentum is a funny thing – just ask the next asteroid you meet! One minute you’re hurtling through space, with more of it than you know what to do with, the next you’re splattered all over the Yucatan Peninsular, taking the entire dinosaur genus out with you. Ouch!

And “Ouch!” probably sums up how the Oval Invincibles are feeling right about now. Having won their opening two games, thanks to match-winning knocks from Dane van Niekerk and Alice Capsey, the momentum was with them. But since then they’ve fallen short twice, chasing low totals – falling 4 runs short needing 110 versus the Superchargers, and 12 runs short chasing 113 against the Fire on Monday.

The result blows the race for third place wide open, with Fire, Invincibles and Rockets all level on 4 points.

Although Sarah Taylor was today’s Player of the Match, catching the eye with a couple of those reverse cuts we first saw when she was playing for the Diamonds earlier this year in the regional T20s, there were other contributions that were equally important.

Georgia Redmayne and Hayley Matthews helping themselves to 24 runs off a 10-ball spell from Grace Gibbs, between balls 30-40, was hugely significant in a low-scoring game. With an “average” 10-ball spell going for just 11 runs on Monday, that extra 13 was critical, and of course later proved to be almost the exact margin of victory.

Nonetheless, 112 felt significantly below par – a calm, sensible batting performance from the Invincibles was all it was going to take to chase them down at little more than a run a ball.

Instead, they got off to a disastrous start – losing Georgia Adams for a duck thanks to some brilliant glove-work from Sarah Taylor, who turned a fumble and a slightly wayward return from Nicole Harvey into a run-out from nowhere as Adams ambled back to her ground. (Adams, who played with Taylor at Sussex for over a decade, really should have known better!)

Nonetheless, Alice Capsey and Grace Gibbs looked to be getting things back on track, until Capsey was bowled by Harvey for 14 off 12. Capsey was the last Invincibles batter (until Jo Gardner came in at the end with the game already gone) to hit at a Strike Rate of more than 100, and while it is true that the Invincibles didn’t need to go at 100mph, they did at least need to go at something close to a run-a ball in order to give themselves a chance at the death.

Fran Wilson’s role probably isn’t to do that, so she can be forgiven for going at a Strike Rate of 87 and trying to anchor the innings; but it is hard to say the same about van Niekerk, who made 8 off 16 balls before she was put out of her misery. Harvey, who finished with two wickets but more importantly conceded just 11 runs from 15 balls, was another vital spoke in the wheel of victory.

And of course Katie George also did her bit. Unable to bowl due to injury, she has been relegated to the role of specialist boundary rider so far during this tournament, but she made it count against Invincibles with 3 catches to dismiss van Niekerk, the dangerous Mady Villiers and Tash Farrant.

She also did it against the backdrop of a wickedly partisan 10,000-strong crowd, many of whom were actively willing her to fail – not something we’re used to seeing in women’s cricket in England, even at international level during the Women’s Ashes.

Talking about it after the game, George said: “I was getting a little bit of stick, but personally, I relish it – I feel I play my best cricket when there are people watching, and it definitely spurs me on to do well. I take it all in good spirit – I know if I was in the crowd watching, which I often am, I’d be giving it the same.”

It’s the right attitude to have, and obviously it is par for the course in something like the men’s T20 Blast for example, but it does feel like a slightly odd sort of progress towards equality compared to the KSL, where even on Finals Day, crowds would cheer but never jeer.

Next up for the Fire is the Trent Rockets on Friday. With both sides currently separated only by Net Run Rate in the race for 3rd, it’s a proper “Four Pointer” which could well end up being the difference between a spot in the 2nd v 3rd “Eliminator” or a taxi home. They remain the underdogs, but if the Fire can pull off another win then that 3rd place will be theirs to lose.

Southern Brave shot down Birmingham Phoenix in full flight at the Ageas Bowl in The Hundred, chasing 141 in just 82 balls, at a Run Rate of 1.71. That’s more than 10 an over in “old money” – by far the best Run Rate posted in the women’s competition to date.

The result puts the Southern Brave top of the table – an increasingly familiar feeling around these parts, with the Southern Vipers currently top of both the 50-over Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy and the T20 Charlotte Edwards Cup.

There’s still a long way to go in The Hundred of course, and topping the league counts for nothing if you don’t go on to win the final, but the Brave have really set down a marker with this performance, after the Phoenix posted 140, which looked like a pretty good score, with Amy Jones in particular looking in lovely touch – hitting 42 off 26 balls.

When Amy Jones took a brilliant catch to dismiss Sophia Dunkley for 36, racing from behind the stumps to take the ball on the dive at short fine leg, it felt like a pivotal moment – Wyatt had made a start on 17 but she was running a lot of singles, and it was Dunkley that was really driving the chase for the Brave, having just hit two consecutive 4s off Em Arlott.

Except… it wasn’t quite to be! The delivery from which Dunkley had been caught was deemed a marginal no ball on height, and she was reprieved. The pivot itself had pivoted, and although the gods made sure to set the record straight – having Dunkley run-out off a deflection from Abtaha Maqsood at the non-striker’s end a few balls later – the Brave looked good for the win from that moment.

Perhaps having taken confidence from Dunkley that there were some serious runs in this pitch, Wyatt began to relax, just as she did for England at Chelmsford a couple of weeks ago. The straight boundaries at the Ageas were short, but square they were huge, which seems to be the policy for this competition. Nonetheless, Wyatt began to find them with ease – hitting five 4s and four 6s, including a huge maximum to finish the game. Crucially, Wyatt also continued to “run” runs – finishing with 25 “run” runs – 36% of her final score. The Hundred may be all about the big hits, but the singles can be just as important and without those 25 runs the Brave would have had a much harder time overhauling their target.

There are still those who have their doubts about Danni Wyatt – having grown up in the pre-professional era, her technique is not what you’d call classical, and she’s very dependent on the inside-out drive over cover, which feels like such a high-risk shot. She hasn’t got the 360 degree arc of Tammy Beaumont… or the power of Nat Sciver… or the precision of team-mate Smriti Mandhana.

But at the end of the day, there comes a point where you can’t argue with the numbers any more – not just in domestic cricket, but against the very best sides in the world, Danni Wyatt continues to prove again and again that on her day, anything you can do, she can do better.

Two years ago, I wrote a piece entitled One Ball from Lauren Bell. The thesis of that piece, which if anything has been reinforced over the past couple of years, is that although there are a lot of fast bowlers around, Bell is the most exciting because she has the ability to ball that “One Ball” which absolutely no one else can. Combining the pace of Lea Tahuhu, the inch-perfect line of Megan Schutt, and the swing of Anya Shrubsole, it is totally unplayable, as Rachel Priest discovered on that day in 2019.

Two years later, as they say in the movies, Trent Rockets are chasing 133 to beat Southern Brave. They are 75-2 – needing 59 from 37 balls. It sounds like a bit of an ask in traditional women’s domestic T20, but in this shorter format, with Nat Sciver at the crease, the game is starting to feel like the Rockets to lose. The Brave need a wicket, which is why captain Anya Shrubsole has brought back not herself, but Lauren Bell, into the attack – looking for a strike from the strike bowler.

Sciver, meanwhile, is looking to go on the attack, coming down the pitch and using the pace off the ball to hit out. After getting a single off the first ball of the over, and two off the third, Sciver targets the fourth. Looking to thump it over mid on, she opens up her front leg and swings through the ball…

Or rather, she swings through where the ball would have been if it had been a “normal” 70mph delivery from Bell. But this is another ball entirely – rolled off the fingers, it dies off the pitch, leaving Sciver swinging at thin air as the zing bails explode over her stumps.

It was such a different ball to that one from 2019, but it had exactly the same result – one of the best batters in the world was left looking like a chump.

The slower ball is becoming something of an art-form among fast bowlers – it isn’t just about bowling it slower, but keeping everything else about the action the same, so it comes out of nowhere. As the Monty Python boys might have said: Nobody expects the slower ball!

Bell does this by rolling the ball off her fingers – a bit like an orthodox spin delivery – but there’s another way too: out of the back of the hand, like a leg-spinner. You may have seen Katherine Brunt do this, but the master of this art is Freya Davies, as Shafali Verma discovered this weekend. Davies delivers a googly out of the back of the hand, which as well as dying on the batter can also turn into the right-hander off the pitch.

The ball from Davies floats through the air like it has hitched a ride on a hot air balloon, but it is a sucker punch for Shafali, who like Nat Sciver is left swinging in the breeze as her stumps fall apart behind her.

You’ll hear a lot during The Hundred about who the fastest bowlers are – the ones who are pushing 80mph, and targeting numbers beyond that even.

But perhaps… just perhaps… speed isn’t everything.