What do you do after an Ashes series like that one? Well, if you’re English cricket, you throw your kitbag in the back of your car and hotfoot it up the M1, stopping at Toddington services to change into your jazziest clothes.
The Hundred launched itself at Trent Bridge on Tuesday like a wrestler body-slamming an unsuspecting opponent. Less than 24 hours had passed since the Oval Test threatened to melt our minds with its unexpected plot twists and grand climax (Ultimate Bazball: The Final Broadcast). Yet here we were, segueing straight from one fever dream to the next. In this case, a doubleheader of Trent Rockets versus Southern Brave.
Nottinghamshire’s ground was a psychedelic binge of colour, yellows and purples and reds and pinks and oranges that continue to suggest no cricketing executive has ever heard of a painters’ wheel, let alone consulted one. The teams emerged from an exploding cloud of pink and green powder that would have made Just Stop Oil proud.
It took a while for spectators and players alike to remember their roles – fair play, it’s been a year – and the stadium was still half-empty when the women’s game got under way. The DJs, bouncing off the walls of their booth, were the only people in the ground who were on it from the start. The rusty Rockets shipped wides and Brave openers Smriti Mandhana and Danni Wyatt didn’t start swinging until the powerplay was through.
Still, it took only 32 balls for Mandhana to scored the first half-century of this year’s tournament. She pulled, she punched, she pierced the field with her laser drives. Maia Bouchier helped out, scoring 31 off 18 before a clatter of wickets stifled progress. With 22 balls remaining, Brave had been 128 for one; they finished 156 for five.
The MC announced that Dylan would be playing between games (who knew the Nobel Laureate was also a fan of the short format?) and Lizelle Lee ran her partner Bryony Smith out on the first ball of the Rockets’ reply. A sequence of misfires left them three wickets down after only 17 balls. Nat Sciver-Brunt did her thing – the one-footed ballet leap that skates the ball over cover, the effortless stringing together of consecutive boundaries – and had 49 off 31 when she thudded the ball straight back at Anya Shrubsole.
Brave won by 27 runs. Mandhana was named the Meerkat Match Hero. A human-sized wombat appeared in the DJ booth, and Dylan turned out to be a 23-year-old blond woman who sang electropop. If this was a hallucination, we were all in it together.
There was no Rashid Khan for the men’s home side; their Afghan star, fresh from the Major League Cricket final, had pulled out with injury the night before. But there was Alex Hales, and Dawid Malan, and there were 19 runs on the board before Hales scooped one off his legs into the hands of Leus du Plooy. 19 for one … 23 for two … 25 for three. Talk about a bad trip.
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50 for four … 54 for five. Sam Hain counterattacked with an unconventional approach that can only be described as total-body batting. He threw himself at the ball, falling over as he ramped Craig Overton for six and finishing with a stunt roll. A swirling pirouette brought four more; a reverse sweep off Tymal Mills ended in a fully seated position. He had 63 runs off 39 balls when Chris Jordan got equally physical, pushing past his batting partner Imad Wasim and wrenching a stump to run him out.
A total of 133 could not be enough. Not on a ground like this, not against a team like James Vince’s. And yet. The top three batters had gone before the midway point of the innings, two of them to Wasim, Khan’s last-minute replacement. Lewis Gregory took three wickets from 15 balls; Daniel Sams took three more. Andy Flower looked on in his hooded yellow tracksuit, a gnomic Teletubby cosplayer.
With 11 needed from five balls, Jordan might have been the man to guide Brave home. He took two from Sams’s first ball, was bowled off the next. Rockets won by six runs; and the crowd – which had swelled from 8,000 for the women’s match to 12,000 by the end of the men’s – would have been breathless enough even without the flame machines sucking oxygen out of the air. The Hundred is back. And it’s as trippy as ever.
