Today in the Women’s Big Bash League saw the Sydney Smash – Thunder hosting Sixers at Drummoyne, just west of Sydney. This post looks back at a bizarre game that ended up being dominated by the youngest player involved.
SIXERS SLUMP AFTER STRONG START
Sydney Thunder skipper Phoebe Litchfield won the toss and chose to bowl first, a decision that her cross-city counterpart Ashleigh Gardner would also have made had she been the one to win the toss. Each side had a youngster in the ranks, Thunder giving a debut to 18 year old all rounder Lucy Finn, while Sixers had 16 year old bowling all rounder Caiomhe Bray (that given name is pronounced like ‘Keeva’ just for the record).
Ellyse Perry was out fairly early, pinned LBW by Georgia Voll with just 16 on the board. Thereafter, with Sophia Dunkley in prime form, and Alyssa Healy taking full toll of a few loose balls things initially looked bright for the Sixers. Their innings took a dramatic turn when Healy tried to go after one from Shabnim Ismail and succeeded only in picking out Samantha Bates who made no mistake with the catch. That was 76-2, and off the last ball of the tenth over Dunkley fell for 43, pinned LBW by Sri Lankan veteran Chamari Athapaththu to make it 80-3 at the halfway stage of the innings. In the second half of the Sixers innings wickets tumbled regularly, with the shining exception of English spin bowling all rounder Mady Villiers who emerged as third top scorer of the innings, with an unbeaten 24. A final total of 142-9 looked on the meagre side, especially from that high water mark of 76-1 after 8.4 overs…
THUNDER TUMBLE
…Sixers needed to start well, and veteran seamer Lauren Cheatle struck with the fourth ball of the Thunder innings, having Voll caught by Villiers to make it 2-1. Then the other new ball bowler, Maitlan Brown, struck twice more, first accepting a soft return chance to dismiss the other opener Tahlia Wilson for 7, and then having the vastly experienced Heather Knight feather one through to Healy for 6 to make it 19-3 in the fourth over. Neither Phoebe Litchfield nor Anika Learoyd played fluently, but they held the fort together until the last ball of the seventh over, bowled by the youngster Bray. Litchfield, who had reached 8 from 14 balls tried to attack against Bray and succeeded in being caught by Gardner to make it 33-4. The next over yielded nine runs, before it was back to Bray, and the biggest events of the night. The first ball of the ninth over did for Learoyd, bowling her for 11 to make it 42-5. That brought the explosive Laura Harris to the crease. Harris tried to do her thing off her first ball and was brilliantly caught by a diving Erin Burns for 0 to give the 16 year old Bray a hat trick comprising three front line batters, some 175 years after All-England skipper Heathfield Harman Stephenson caused the term to be coined by dismissing three batters with successive balls in a match in Sheffield, which led to the crowd, impressed by the performance, to pass round a hat for a collection and present both hat and contents to Stephenson. Incidentally, though this match was flawless in this regard this edition of the WBBL had not overall been notable for catches being held. That was 42-6, and Lucy Finn came to the crease. Four balls into the second half of the innings Athapaththu holed out to Gardner to give Bray her fourth scalp of the innings and make it 49-3, the Sri Lankan managing only 3 (6). Bray had two balls of her allocation left to make it a five-for, but was not able to do so. However, her final 4-0-15-4 including the hat trick had settled who would be named Player of the Match. Thunder’s own youngster, Finn, now took centre stage, as she, with good support from tail enders Taneale Peschel and Shabnim Ismail (number 11 Samantha Bates not being required in the end) proceeded to produce an innings that exposed just how badly her supposed betters had handled their duties. She just missed on reaching 50, but her 49 not out, in the course of which she never looked in any trouble was the highest score of the match on either side – quite something for a debutant who came into the match considered more of a bowler than a batter (and though, like all else, it was overshadowed by Bray’s performance 3-0-27-1 on professional T20 debut is no one’s idea of a failure). Thunder with this late revival reached 118-8, beaten by 24 runs.
PHOTOGRAPHS
This gallery features images taken with three cameras – the Nikon Coolpix B500 that was my first choice camera until it died on Tuesday morning, the Canon EOS 4000D that is my reserve camera, and the Panasonic DC-FZ82D which I ordered on Wednesday and arrived yesterday and is now my new first choice camera…
aspiblog 