Starting very early this morning UK time there was a double header in the WBBL. As the schedulers planned it the warm up act was a game between Brisbane Heat and Melbourne Stars, while the main event was the ‘Sydney Smash’ – Sydney Sixers against Sydney Thunder. This post looks at what actually eventuated.
HEAT v STARS
I was ready for the start of this game, but there was a never-explained problem with the BBC hook up to the Aussie commentary, so I missed a massive chunk of the first innings, but due to another circumstance of which more later I got hear everything I had missed later on. Stars batted first, and Yastika Bhatia and Annabel Sutherland led off with a stand of 31 in 4.2 overs before Lucy Hamilton, an 18 year old left arm fast bowler, made her first mark on the match by bowling Bhatia. One run later Sutherland was also on her way back, caught by Shikha Pandey off Hamilton. Meg Lanning and Marizanne Kapp took Stars past 50, but then came a double body blow for the Stars. Off the last ball of the eighth over Kapp edged one from leg spinner Grace Parsons through to Redmayne to make it 53-3. Then off the first ball of the ninth over Hamilton secured her third scalp, inducing an edge from Lanning which Redmayne snaffled to make it 53-4. Tess Flintoff has something of a reputation for big hitting, but there was little sign of that this innings. Having had one piece of luck when a risky shot off Hamilton went just too high for Heat skipper Jess Jonassen to reach Flintoff proceeded to pick out Jonassen off the very next ball to fall for 7 (10) and make it 67-5, and four wickets to Hamilton, at a cost of just eight runs, and she still had an over to come. Rhys McKenna and Deepti Sharma were now together. They added 14 together before McKenna was run out, which brought Kim Garth into join Sharma. The score had risen to 89 by the start of the 15th over, Hamilton’s fourth. After four successive dot balls Sharma was pinned LBW to give Hamilton her first ever WBBL five-for, and the first five-for by a pacer in this year’s tournament. Sasha Moloney survived the last ball of the over, but it was another dot, meaning that Hamilton had finished her allocation with a wicket maiden, and the barely credible figures of 4-1-8-5 (reads more like a PIN than a genuine bowling analysis!), with Stars reeling at 96-8. The ninth wicket pair, helped by Hamilton being finished, produced the best Stars partnership other than the opening effort, putting on 28 together before Shikha Pandey got Maisy Gibson with the aid of a catch by Charli Knott. Sophie Day provided further support for Kim Garth, and the last pair added a further 14 before Day was run out off the last ball of the innings. Kim Garth had top scored with 31 not out from number eight in the order, with only Sutherland (21) and McKenna (20) of the others in the line up reaching 20.
Grace Harris was out cheaply for Heat, but a good partnership between Georgia Redmayne and Jemimah Rodrigues took them past 50 at a good rate. Rodrigues and Charli Knott then put on 50 more together for the third wicket. Laura Harris contributed a rapid 10, and then skipper Jess Jonasses joined Knott and this pair were still in residence when Heat crossed the finish line with 2.3 overs and six wickets to spare. Heat thus moved up to 10 points and third in the table, while Stars joined Adelaide Strikers as a team known to be eliminated from the tournament. Hamilton, whose bowling had wrecked the Stars innings was named Player of the Match. Scorecard here.
THE SYDNEY SMASH
Sixers won the bat flip, and in spite of their shocking record as a chasing side Perry decided to put Thunder in to bat. Perry’s reason for doing this was a reckoning that DLS would intervene and that if that happened it would gacour the side that batted second.
Thunder never really got going with the bat, though Georgia Voll, fresh from a match winning effort, scored 29 off 21 balls. Phoebe Litchfield scored 28 off 25 balls. The only other double figure scores were 19 off 26 balls by Georgia Adams and 14 off 16 balls by Sammy-Jo Johnson. The biggest disappointment was Sri Lankan star Chamari Athapaththu who took 17 balls to amass a score of 7. Thunder were 121 all out from 19.5 overs, with the last two wickets run outs, the victim of the latter, Samantha Bates, not even getting to face a ball. Amelia Kerr, star of the recent Women’s T20 World Cup, had 3-16 from her four overs and also pouched three catches.
Sixers would have felt confident of chasing such a modest score, but the weather gods intervened rather more decisively than even Ellyse Perry had budgeted for. Two overs into the Sixers reply with the score at 9-1, Bates having just had Perry caught by Voll, the left arm spinner’s 17th scalp of the tournament, number three Ashleigh Gardner having negotiated the final two balls of the second over, the heavens opened. The rain didn’t relent, and eventually, with lightning in the area creating extra safety concerns, the match was abandoned, meaning that each side took one point. For Thunder that moved them at least temporarily to the top of the table on 11 points. For Sixers, on seven points with two group games to go it leaves them drinking in the last chance saloon. 11 Points would qualify them, 10 would give them a chance (another washout and a win), but nine or fewer would definitely mean curtains for them. The Sixers have a stellar collection of players on their books, but somehow seem to end up adding up to much less than the sum of their parts. Scorecard here.
PHOTOGRAPHS
These photographs come from yesterday. I have a second post coming to showcase todays photographs.
aspiblog 