As with Invincibles in the Eliminator yesterday, so with Fire today – failure to put quite enough runs on the board in the 1st innings, and in particular a post-powerplay lull in the Early Middle phase, made it too easy for a London Spirit side that have looked workmanlike at best, but nonetheless claimed the prize because that’s all they needed to be.
Georgia Redmayne won player of the match; Deepti Sharma struck the winning six; but it was Dani Gibson that was perhaps the key player for Spirit. We gave her both barrels for her bowling yesterday, as she conceded 38 runs (one of the worst bowling returns in the history of the competition) and she didn’t have the best outing with the ball today either (0-16 from 10 balls) but she made up for it with the bat.
With the Heather Knight/ Georgia Redmayne partnership having gone undefeated on the way to victory yesterday yesterday, it looked for all the world like we were heading the same way again, with Spirit on 50-2 at the half-way point in the chase.
Interguinely though, WinHer had the Fire edging it 56%-44%, and if Fire could break the Knight/ Redmayne partnership, you felt they had a real chance to win the game; so when Shabnim Ismail returned to castle Heather Knight, that meant Gibson walking out to the middle with the match on a knife-edge. But the only edge was a slightly streaky single for Gibson’s first run.
Gibson then timed her next delivery from Ismail perfectly through backward point for 4, using the South African’s pace against her, before hitting the next for another boundary to midwicket. The change of ends meant Redmayne held the strike until the final two deliveries of the following set, which Gibson again struck for a brace of fours off Hayley Matthews. The first ball of the next set, bowled by Freya Davies? Another 4 – 5 consecutive boundaries in all.
Gibson because Ismail’s 3rd and final victim shortly after, but the 22 off 9 balls she’d added had turned a tricky chase into a canter for the batters who came in after her, with Deepti playing exactly the same smart cricket that Redmayne and Knight had in the Eliminator, knowing exactly what she needed to do, and waiting for the right time to strike the big shot which carried Spirit over the finish line. And who else would it be out there with Deepti when she hit the winning runs at Lord’s but Charlie Dean?
Like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, where (spoiler alert!) the villain from the first film returns as the hero for the second, Deepti turned her story around, winning over a Lord’s crowd of over 22,000 with the biggest cheer of the afternoon as she hoisted the trophy high on the podium after the match.
It has been a fascinating Hundred in the Women’s Competition, with the feeling that any one of 5 sides could have won it. London Spirit lost 3 games and scraped through to the Eliminator in 3rd place; but both Oval Invincibles and Welsh Fire lost 2 games apiece, so neither had dominated the way Brave did last season. In the end, it became a test of nerve and a test of smarts, and that’s where Spirit had the edge – beating teams that had lost to in the group stages because they held their nerve and remembered their smarts when it really mattered.
![Yashasvi Jaiswal sets the tone with a massive six off Tim Southee off the second ball of the innings [WATCH]](https://i3.wp.com/cricxtasy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Jaiswal-six-in-the-2nd-ball-of-the-innings.png?w=380&resize=380,220&ssl=1 "Yashasvi Jaiswal sets the tone with a massive six off Tim Southee off the second ball of the innings [WATCH]")
