Superchargers v Welsh Fire
In a tournament that lasts no more than a month, it’s the fine print of the regulations that decides the issue.
Welsh Fire are eliminated because they finished one point behind Superchargers. Why the one point? Because they had two rained-off matches to NS’s one.
Who had the faster scoring-rate? Welsh Fire: +0.602 to +0.357. But points count above RR.
Why could the game not go on longer?
1. Because of regulations regarding lightning. 30 minutes must elapse after the last lightning strike or thunder boom before the umpires may take the field again, unless they are satisfied the danger is over. Easy! Just a few lives at risk, that’s all.
2. Because a men’s eliminator was to begin at 6.00, the women’s game had to finish by 5.11 pm.
The men’s game was completed. 397 runs were scored.
You can supply your own conclusions. Here are one or two of mine:
There we see the disadvantage of the double-header. Till that moment of abandonment, most people would have agreed that the pattern of two games on one day on one ground had been a raging success. But this wasn’t the first time a women’s game had been downgraded to enable a men’s game to take place.
Where’s the equality of opportunity there?
One of the abiding weaknesses of incomplete limited-overs matches (I need here to introduce an unfamiliar term, ‘limited-sets matches’ to satisfy the regulation-makers of The Hundred) is: there is no clear way of assessing who deserves to win.
Was WF’s score of 104-2 off 75 balls a likely winning total? How long is a piece of string? Had the game restarted, the umpires would then have calculated the number of balls NS would receive, and that would depend upon the expertise of the three mathematicians who defined the DLS method.
So a thoroughly unsatisfactory ending to what promised to be a thrilling contest. Fire came properly alive only when Laura Harris arrived on stage. Her big hitting helped Tammy Beaumont to find her touch again, and she followed suit by whacking a Kate Cross delivery over the mid-wicket fence.
But we were deprived of seeing a string of other players, including some big-name imports, from strutting their stuff.
Note: this piece was written before the Sunday game started. The sun is shining.
