Harry Brook smashed the fastest Hundred century but it proved in vain as Welsh Fire kept alive their hopes of making Saturday’s eliminator with an eight-wicket win over Northern Superchargers at Headingley.
Brook crashed a scintillating 105 off 42 balls but found little support as Superchargers posted 158 for seven.
Stephen Eskinazi’s fifty set Fire on their way, before Jonny Bairstow hit 44 and Joe Clarke 42 to lift the visitors to victory.
Fire will reach the eliminator if Manchester Originals beat Southern Brave on Wednesday.
Brook, who was left out of England’s World Cup squad last week, played a remarkable lone hand to lead a Superchargers recovery.
Matthew Short, Tom Banton and Adam Lyth all departed inside the first 20 balls to leave Superchargers reeling at 10 for three, having won the toss.
Brook began patiently alongside Adam Hose, but exploded into life after Hose fell to David Payne after 33 balls.
He produced an audacious ramp over third for six from a searing Lockie Ferguson bouncer and hit Roelef van der Merwe down the ground for another thumping maximum.
Brook was running out of partners as Adil Rashid fell to the left-arm spinner and David Wiese was run out by Tom Abell to leave the total at 92 for seven.
But Brook marched on undeterred, reaching 50 from 24 balls, and hit the accelerator by smashing 19 from Luke Wells’ five-ball set.
The right-hander combined outrageous power with pure timing, hammering Ferguson down the ground for a six which landed on the Sky Sports commentary pod.
With 10 balls of the innings remaining Brook was on 76 but he surged to his century with two more sixes and four fours as 30 came from those final 10 deliveries.
Momentum was with the hosts but Eskinazi soon set about changing that.
The right-hander hit two sixes from Reece Topley’s second set, before being given a life as Topley and Matthew Potts left a high catch to each other.
Eskinazi made the most of his reprieve, crashing his way to 50 from just 19 balls, including three sixes, with Fire well placed on 66 without loss after 40 balls.
The introduction of Rashid applied the brakes – especially to Bairstow who had just eight from his first 18 balls.
Rashid then made the key breakthrough, bowling Eskinazi for 58 from the 51st ball, with Fire needing 82 more to win.
Bairstow began to find his fluency as he and new batter Clarke both launched sixes off Wiese, before Callum Parkinson’s 10-ball set ended badly with a six off Bairstow followed by a no-ball which cost four runs.
Fire were cruising to the win, needing 19 from 20 balls, but Brook emerged again with a stunning boundary catch to remove Bairstow for 44 – looping the ball up first to himself and then to Hose to avoid carrying it over the rope.
But Clarke took his side home, hitting 42 from 22 to keep Fire’s hopes burning.
IPL: KKR ensured top-two spot after washout
The first abandoned game of the Indian Premier League ensures Kolkata Knight Riders will finish in the top two and Gujarat Titans’ elimination from playoff contention.
A combination of lightning and rain meant there was not even a toss, with the intense storm ripping banners from the stands, which later wrapped around the floodlights.
KKR had all but ensured a place in the top two due to their dominating net run-rate, but a 19th point of the season confirmed it, leaving them with one game to try and clinch top spot for the first time.
The Titans needed to win their final two games to give themselves any hope of reaching the playoffs, though it would have proven tough for the side with the lowest net run-rate in the league.
It is the first time GT have failed to make the playoffs since they joined the competition before the 2022 season.
Tape ball programme can help England find unorthodox talent – Richard Gould
The England and Wales Cricket Board hopes to unearth a new seam of talent beyond the game’s traditional league structure with a national tape ball scheme that allows players to thrive without “whites, willow and leather”.
The practice of using a soft ball wrapped in electrical tape to aid swing and variable bounce is a common one in Asia, where it has helped produce express pace bowlers like Haris Rauf, Shaheen Afridi and spinners such as Rashid Khan and Shakib-al-Hasan, but has been slow to enter the mainstream conversation in the United Kingdom.
The Chance to Shine charity has long pioneered tape ball cricket as part of its engagement hubs and now, with the ECB keen to live up to its lofty aspiration of becoming the most inclusive team sport in the country, it is at the heart of a new core cities programme designed to engage ‘diverse communities in urban areas’.
Speaking at a launch event where games were hosted in a warehouse space in Birmingham, ECB chief executive Richard Gould was optimistic about reaching out to those with an interest in cricket but limited access to the pavilions and prepared pitches in the club setup.
“We talk about clubs with picket fences around them. In the past that has been seen as the preserve of the ECB. We’ve missed a complete trick on that,” he said.
“When we talk about the recreational game we’re not just talking about Premier League clubs and village cricket clubs now. We’re talking about all forms of cricket that take place.
“You can play the game anywhere, any time, with anybody, in any environment you want. You don’t have to have whites, willow and leather to do it. You can just pick up a bat and a ball and have some fun.”
As well as fulfilling its remit of reaching out to all comers at a grassroots level, Gould also believes there are benefits to finding cricketers with different styles who have learned the game outside the traditional, private-school heavy pathways.
“Without doubt there are,” he said. “We have to get out and try to find the talent. More to the point, we have to try and find talent in areas that we haven’t normally looked for it.
“I do think county pathways will be looking to make sure they don’t miss out on this talent. It’s just about punching through all of our normal procedures and finding ways to both get people in the game and unearthing that talent which may be unorthodox and great.”
Meg Lanning: Exercise obsession and not enough fuel led to Australia retirement
Former Australia captain Meg Lanning revealed her “obsession” with exercise and not eating enough precipitated her surprise international retirement late last year.
Lanning was at the helm of one of the most dominant eras the sport has ever seen but she missed last year’s Ashes for medical reasons and pulled the plug on her Australia career in November.
She opened up about her hidden health issues on the Howie Games podcast, explaining that running up to 90 kilometres a week coupled with eating two small meals a day led to her dropping from 64kg to 57kg.
View this post on Instagram“I was over-exercising and under-fuelling,” the 32-year-old said. “It wasn’t a physical thing. I’ve always been really physically active and liked that side of it, but it became a bit of an obsession.
“I’d maybe eat a couple of meals a day if I was lucky but they weren’t significant. Initially it didn’t start off as a deliberate thing, it just became a bit of a new normal.
“But it slowly crept into conscious decisions because essentially I felt good.
“I wasn’t getting injured like everybody was telling me I was going to do. It sort of just spiralled and I was in denial, even though everybody kept telling me something wasn’t quite right.
“I was not in a place to be able to go on tour and play cricket and give the commitment levels that were required for that Ashes series, mentally and physically.”
Lanning, who led Australia to five World Cup titles in total and Commonwealth Games glory in 2022, said her struggle was not officially diagnosed as an eating disorder.
“It wasn’t labelled as that but I was exercising a lot and I wasn’t eating enough to fuel that – it was a bit out of whack,” Lanning said.
“It was a bit of control because I felt very out of control with what my future looked like. I felt like I was in control of that and that made me feel better.”
Lanning sought help from medical professionals after also struggling with insomnia and continues to play domestically, while she has been signed for London Spirit for The Hundred this year.
“I dreaded night time because I knew I would go to bed and not be able to sleep,” she said. “That would make me so mad. I would just get more angry with myself. If you can’t sleep, you can’t do anything.
“I feel like I’m in a good spot now. Cricket is still part of what I do. But I wasn’t cut out for the international touring schedule and what came with all of that.”
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