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Eight-wicket win with 13 balls remaining continues to skyrocket for Vince’s men
Courageous from the South 147 for 2 (de Kock 57 *, Vince 53) beat Welsh fire 144 for 5 (Banton 36, Phillips 30 *, du Plooy 30) by eight wickets
Southern Brave will spend the next 48 hours at the top of the Men’s and Women’s Hundred standings after securing a double victory over Welsh Fire.
After back-to-back losses in their opener, Brave was on the ropes at the start of the season but rebounded in style, scoring four rebound wins (plus one to no avail) and finding a winning formula on his home turf at the Ageas Bowl. They follow the standard narrative arc of a team of Mahela Jayawardene, mimicking her success with the famous Mumbai Indians starting slowly.
Their last game, at home against the Oval Invincibles on Monday night, increasingly looks like a shootout for a round of 16 berth, although the Trent Rockets’ loser of the Trent Rockets game against Birmingham Phoenix on Friday will look anxiously over their shoulders .
The fire, meanwhile, is mathematically out: they won their first two games thanks to a 50 consecutive game from their captain Jonny Bairstow, but have nosedived since his surprise recall from Test with five defeats on the rebound.
The circumstances of De Kock’s second consecutive unbeaten run in the Hundreds were odd: he faced just three balls out of the first 30 in the chase, with Paul Stirling starting with a Powerplay limit blitz and Vince protecting the southpaw. of a match-up with Glenn Phillips’ counterattack, and should have been released lbw against Qais Ahmad on the 13th, but Fire chose not to use their criticism. “I wasn’t very lucky, but the other two guys were flying,” de Kock said afterwards. “It took patience.
Vince dominated with calm innings, leading, shooting and sweeping to score all around the field and bringing in a 36-ball fifty without breaking a sweat on true hybrid ground. He finally dived Qais long-haul for 53, at which point de Kock took over: he managed a Jimmy Neesham out on the midwicket, then hit Qais for consecutive limits and hit him for six to eliminate. all semblance of scoring pressure.
He started the tournament with a streak of unconverted starts, but has now scored 129 points without being fired in his last two innings. He’s in the kind of form that marked him as one of the few remaining superstars of the hundred and demonstrates why Jayawardene was so thrilled to have him come in as David Warner’s replacement.
Brave’s backload
Vince started the tournament looking out of his depth as a captain, fueling Trent Rockets’ strong options with a series of odd calls and going wrong in the loss at Cardiff. But he improved markedly – perhaps thanks to Jayawardene’s influence – and started withholding a significant chunk of his death bowlers’ allowance for the end of an inning.
It’s been a tough 18 months for Tom Banton, whose star has dropped significantly since he burst onto the T20 scene with a stellar year in 2019 that saw him ignite the Blast and Big Bash, and earn himself PSL and IPL contracts. He struggled with the bio-bubble life on the sidelines of the England squad last year and had a nightmarish start to the year, contracting Covid-19 at PSL which affected him during the first few months of summer with Somerset.
He eventually returned to form in late June, scoring 77 and 107 no in back-to-back Blast innings, but was later called up to England’s ODI squad to make the drinks work and lost all rhythm when forced to self-isolate after teammates test positive. He only managed 60 points in his first six innings for Welsh Fire and looked horribly out of form.
So his 36 of 20 was a welcome return to fluidity, if not quite the game-winning score required to stop Fire’s collapse. He hit three sixes in the span of five balls in Powerplay, tasked Danny Briggs with throwing him a long distance, then lifting and pulling back-to-back deliveries from George Garton into the stands. He tried to keep the innings moving as he faced Lintott in the middle of the phase, but sank into the deep midwicket before he could continue.
Matt Roller is associate editor at ESPNcricinfo. @ mroller98
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