Invincibles wrapped up a disappointing 2023 campaign with a thrilling 3-run win against Trent Rockets at The Oval on Monday, after racking up the highest total so far made at the ground in the Women’s Hundred – 155.

Many have been asking what has gone wrong for reigning champions Invincibles this season: despite retaining their core squad from the past two seasons, they had managed just two wins from seven matches prior to this game. The loss of Dane van Niekerk early on certainly hasn’t helped matters.

But on Monday it was her injury replacement Nadine de Klerk who took her chance to shine, striking 51* from 25 balls – the second fastest fifty in the Women’s Hundred (thanks Hypocaust for the stat) – in her first ever match at The Oval.

She was backed up by some beautifully clean six-hitting from Cordelia Griffith (23 off 16), and there was redemption, too, for Sophia Smale, who after a breakthrough season in 2022 has struggled somewhat with “second album syndrome”, but put on an excellent display, taking two for 26 and assisting in the run-out of Fran Wilson as Rockets failed to launch.

Invincibles’ innings was bookended by contrasting spells from left-arm seamer Alexa Stonehouse. Her first two sets reduced the home side to 30 for 2: she swung the ball through the defences of Lauren Winfield-Hill for a duck, before bowling Suzie Bates with a straight one in her next set. Marizanne Kapp then treated her with due respect, playing out three dots.

But at the death, with Stonehouse tasked with sending down balls 91 to 95, de Klerk had no such qualms. “It was hard to play spin and I knew I had to take someone down,” she said afterwards. And so she did. The set of “five” (actually a set of seven, containing two no-balls) began with a head-high full toss which de Klerk slammed for six over deep midwicket, and got worse from there, eventually costing 27 runs.

Not only is it the most expensive set ever bowled in three seasons of the Women’s Hundred, it almost broke Syd’s strike-rate chart!

Stonehouse is considered a future England prospect, but is only 18 years old and could have done with a bit of moral support. It was therefore slightly disappointing to see that none of her teammates (including her captain, Nat Sciver-Brunt) approached her for a quiet “shall-we-think-about-this” word until there were just two balls left in the set (and it was arguably too late to make much difference).

In reply, Lizelle Lee hefted her way to 61 from 33 balls, but Rockets’ chase was almost derailed by the lack of support at the other end. That included a very unconvincing 12-ball 9 from Harmanpreet Kaur, to top off what has been a poor tournament for her (72 runs in six innings). Has she been more affected by her impending two-match suspension in the wake of Bangladesh-Gate than she is letting on?

The match looked to be effectively over when Lee was run out off the 71st ball coming back for a second run by a brilliant direct hit-throwdown of the stumps from bowler Paige Scholfield, who broke out of her follow-through and dashed over to midwicket to retrieve the ball. Being brutally honest, though, it was also a poor call from Jo Gardner. “Maybe at the beginning of my innings that would have been two, but I was a little bit tired,” Lee said ruefully after the match.

There was very nearly a redemption arc for Stonehouse, who – with 18 needed off the final set – struck three boundaries in a row against Scholfield to get the equation down to five needed off the final ball. Finally, though, a good yorker from Scholfield sealed the deal for Invincibles.

De Klerk said after the match that despite spending three months in the UK this summer playing for The Blaze, she had actually been back home in South Africa when the phone call came (midway through a match!) asking if she would consider flying back to play in The Hundred.

“We had a cricket camp for South Africa so it was a bit of chaos to get over here,” she said. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Perhaps… although it’s also possible that her innings on Monday will see her snapped up as an overseas star in next year’s competition.

Freya Kemp says that her crucial innings of 41 not out from 21 balls, which took Southern Brave to a 7-wicket win against Oval Invincibles at the Ageas Bowl on Saturday, was inspired by her call-up to the England squad the previous day.

The 18-year-old Kemp featured for England against both South Africa and India last summer, but was ruled out of the T20 World Cup after suffering a stress fracture in her back. She has been unable to bowl in a match this season for either Southern Vipers or Southern Brave.

However, England coach Jon Lewis has shown enough faith in her abilities with the bat to call her up to play purely as a batter in England’s forthcoming internationals against Sri Lanka.

“He [Lewis] called me a few days ago,” Kemp told CRICKETher on Saturday. “It’s good to know that they’re backing me as a batter.”

“[It inspired me] subconsciously – I went out there and was clear about my plans, and that helped me.”

Kemp added that there was no fixed date for her return with the ball, but said her comeback was progressing smoothly:

“I’m just working on my action and building up my overs. It’s a slow build-up but it’s going really well.”

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!

Imagine for a second how it feels to be Dane van Niekerk right now.

After a difficult few months in which you were prevented from playing in a home World Cup due to an arbitrary fitness target, you’re finally ready to burst back onto the scene by leading Oval Invincibles’ title defence.

Then, in your team’s match against Manchester Originals, you suffer a nasty blow to your thumb. On Sunday, you are ruled out of the rest of The Hundred after scans reveal that the thumb injury will require surgery to fix.

On Monday, you discover (via ESPNCricinfo) that Cricket South Africa have decided to abolish the fitness standard which brought about your premature retirement from international cricket.

There is one silver lining: you can stay with Invincibles for the duration of the tournament. Tuesday comes around, and it’s time for their match v London Spirit – a local derby which Invincibles have never lost. You participate in the team talk pre-match, imparting some of that famous tactical wisdom which you are known for.

Something you AREN’T known for is being a good watcher of cricket. But that’s OK, because your replacement skipper Suzie Bates has decided that your wife, Marizanne Kapp, should bowl all her deliveries in the opening 35 balls of the match.

You watch her take two wickets for 13 runs in her allotted 20 balls, including bowling poor Niamh Holland in her opening set, with a beauty which the 18-year-old had no idea what to do with.

You are left pondering about Heather Knight’s bizarre decision to promote Holland to face your wife at the top of the order, while omitting Grace Scrivens from the XI – despite the fact that Scrivens regularly opens for her region (you are well aware of this, being her captain at Sunrisers), and Holland does not.

Minutes later, two Spirit players are “having words” with each other mid-pitch after a dopey run-out, while your wife does the nearest thing she ever does on the pitch to smiling. Eventually, London Spirit sink to 87 for 9 after 78 balls. You nod to yourself, satisfied. Invincibles have this in the bag.

Except, two hours later – after a 10th-wicket partnership of 31 in 22 balls between Lauren Filer and Tara Norris; and a powerplay in which Invincibles manage to put just 23 runs on the board – it turns out they didn’t.

It’s Tuesday evening, and you could, should, have been celebrating. Instead, your side’s title defence is slipping through your fingers (Invincibles sit fourth in the table but have only a 3% chance of qualifying for the knockouts) – and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

After Oval Invincibles lost to London Spirit on a balmy Tuesday afternoon at The Oval by 22 runs, I asked Sophia Smale what van Niekerk would be saying to her teammates in the post-match dressing-room review. “How did we lose it, probably!” came the reply.

Dane van Niekerk has undoubtedly had better weeks.

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.