Southern Brave conclude group stage against Rockets, turn focus to Eliminator

As The Hundred enters its final week, every game has added significance. At Trent Bridge, first in the table played second as Trent Rockets and Southern Brave locked horns, with automatic qualification for The Hundred Final next Sunday still just about up for grabs.

And it was the home side who spared themselves the nerve-shredding drama of Friday’s Eliminator, avoiding the big defeat that would have put their place in the final in peril, then chasing down the Brave’s 117-5 thanks to a destructive late cameo from Nat Sciver-Brunt.

With their respective net run rates, the Brave needed to win by 94 runs to overtake the Rockets once they had been inserted. They had lost Jemimah Rodrigues to a hamstring injury, with Charli Knott coming in, while captain Sophie Molineux was unavailable due to a stomach bug, Laura Wolvaardt taking the armband. 

Although the Brave’s top three of Maia Bouchier, Lizelle Lee and Wolvaardt all went beyond 20, they couldn’t convert it beyond. Lee was the first to go with the score on 49 off 47 and things did not speed up sufficiently from that point for the Brave to think about the kind of margin of victory they were looking for.

When the Rockets batted they knew that they were already as good as in the final but that did not initially seem to free them up. Lauren Bell, Issy Wong and Tilly Corteen-Coleman combined to leave their much-vaunted line-up in tatters as they crawled to 10-3 after 25 balls, the lowest powerplay score in the history of the competition. 

Ash Gardner counter-punched, hitting the game’s only six, and when she slammed Corteen-Coleman over mid-off to take the score to 26, the Rockets were in the final. She and Bess Heath combined for 53 before both went within the space of three runs.

That merely served to bring in Sciver-Brunt with a daunting 51 needed from 30 balls. Nine balls later she was on 25 with five fours, three in succession off Wong and after Adams was run out unluckily, Georgia Elwiss joined Sciver-Brunt and her cool 10 off four balls helped Sciver-Brunt ace the chase.

Southern Brave look to put behind these recent couple of games and turn their full attention to the eliminator to make it to two back-to-back finals.