After 5 seasons of Regionals, the Final Final ended in a deluge of rain with a win by 27 runs for Sunrisers on DLS.
Champions 🏆
— CRICKETher (@crickether.bsky.social) 2024-09-21T15:42:01.085Z
The team that won no 50-over games in 2020; none in 2021; and none in 2022 – changing captains and coaches along the way – started to turn things around in 2023, getting their first RHF Trophy win against reigning champions Vipers on the opening day of the season. But it wasn’t until they appointed their 4th captain at the back end of 2023 that the gears really began to shift.
Grace Scrivens was just 19 when she was appointed captain in September 2023, but had already skippered Kent and England A. Leaders like Scrivens don’t come along very often – the last one that came from Essex caused the Romans a bit of bother back in AD61, burning Colchester to the ground in the process. Fortunately for the rest of us, Scrivens kept her warfare on the cricket pitch, with Sunrisers winning their last 4 games of the 2023 season to finish in 4th place, missing out on a semi-final place by just 5 points.
To say that ‘The tide had turned’ however would not be accurate – it would imply a degree of inevitability which in reality did not exist. In the group stages Sunrisers only just won more games than they lost – winning 7 and losing 6, and scraping into the semi-finals at the last gasp. But what they did do was win the games that mattered – the final ‘must-win’ group game against Vipers; a tough semi-final versus Diamonds; and now the final against Stars. Those are the games that you win by believing you can win; and that comes from leadership.
Of course, leadership alone isn’t enough – you have to back that up on the pitch as well, and Scrivens did so today – bowling 8.2 overs at an Economy Rate of 2.5 and then adding a cool, calm 39* before the rains came to finish the game. But in neither case was Scrivens quite ‘leading from the front’. Asked about her style of captaincy following the trophy presentation, she had this to say:
“You’ve got to back your players and try and build good relationships with them, set roles and stick with them. It’s about sticking with players, and then they come out and deliver. Giving belief into players and trusting in them.”
She did that today, with Cordelia Griffith – allowing her to take the initiative from the moment she entered the fray in the second over.
Stars 212 v Sunrisers 121-3 (T: 95) #RHF
— CRICKETher (@crickether.bsky.social) 2024-09-21T15:23:33.915Z
Griffith reached 50 having faced twice as many balls as Scrivens, with the captain happy to turn over the strike to the player in form, putting Sunrisers well ahead of the rate required to maintain a “lead” on DLS, even if they lost a couple of wickets, which they ultimately did.
Remarkably, Griffith said afterwards that she wasn’t even aware that rain was threatening: “I had no idea rain was coming – it just so happened that I was given enough balls to put away and get ahead of the rate early.” You can bet that Scrivens knew though – the DLS par was after all literally writ-large in front of their faces, on the big electronic scoreboard in the corner of the ground. But again, that’s true leadership – Scrivens wasn’t shouldering the strike, but she was carrying the responsibility of worrying about the rain and keeping that from her partner so that she was free to play her game without those worries.
Another crucial player for Sunrisers, both today and through the season, was Lissy MacLeod. MacLeod has been around the block a few times – she won the first ever Kia Super League with Vipers, back in 2016 (and the second with Western Storm the following year) and has now added a winner’s medal in the final RHF Trophy, 8 years later. The weight of runs she scored this season (just over 200) might not be up there with Scrivens (553) or Griffith (420); but without the 50 she made in the de-facto quarter-final against Vipers, Sunrisers would not even have been here.
Equally, a 12 not out today from Macleod might not seem much, but at the stage she came in the most important things were a) support Scrivens, the set batter; and b) not get out, which would have made the DLS a lot closer. And she did both (a) and (b).
With the ball, both Kate Coppack and Jodi Grewcock finished the tournament with 19 wickets for Sunrisers; with the former starring today, getting a bit of swing early on, and a little (just enough) bite off the pitch later, to take 4-27. Getting rid of Alexa Stonehouse, and newly capped England player Paige Scholfield early-doors, combined with the run out of Bryony Smith (which goes down on the scorecard as ‘Run Out (Villiers)’ but should really be ‘Run Out (Bryony Smith)’ such was her own culpability) meant that the big hitters in Stars’ lineup – the ones that could have got them to a much more intimidating 250+ – were eliminated from the equation. Alice Davidson-Richards did a magnificent job, and was rewarded afterwards with the Player of the Tournament medal from the PCA’s MVP computer, but she is the anchor not the cannon, so without the big hitting going on around her, Stars ended up well short of par.
Stars 212 v Sunrisers #RHF
— CRICKETher (@crickether.bsky.social) 2024-09-21T12:22:25.198Z
Stars will no doubt lament that if the rain hadn’t come, they could have… would have… should have… worn Sunrisers down, and might have been able to bowl them out, which is realistically what they’d have needed to do – the required rate at 25 overs was under 4, so Sunrisers would have made it unless they’d been dismissed. But… them’s the breaks – the rains came, leaving the players watching puddles forming from the dressing room balcony before officials finally confirmed the abandonment and the result. The yelps of delight from the Sunrisers players could be heard from across the ground in the press box. They might not have been the best team through the season, but they won the games that mattered. That’s how competitions work, and for that reason their joy was thoroughly deserved.
