England handed New Zealand a humiliating defeat here on Saturday evening, winning the fourth T20 by seven wickets with 51 balls to spare. Fittingly it was Nat Sciver-Brunt who brought up the winning runs, reverse-sweeping Melie Kerr for back-to-back boundaries just 24 hours after Surrey CCC chose to honour their Super League-winning captain by unveiling a new gate at the Oval bearing her name.
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The captain, Heather Knight, who returned from her one-match hiatus to share a 31-run partnership with Sciver-Brunt, labelled it a “ruthless” performance and said that England had “fed off the energy” from the 16,500-strong crowd.
After putting on their best face in the third T20 at Canterbury and falling short in the final over, normal service resumed here – New Zealand only just scraping past 100 from their 20 overs, after another hide-behind-the-sofa collapse of four wickets for nine runs immediately after the powerplay.
Sarah Glenn started the rot with two wickets in her opening over – a quicker ball shattering the stumps of Georgia Plimmer, who had put on an opening stand of 33 with Suzie Bates. Two balls later, Glenn burgled the wicket of Melie Kerr, whose ugly swipe sent the leg-spinner’s half-tracker straight to Alice Capsey at short midwicket.
Sophie Ecclestone shattered the stumps of Bates and Dani Gibson did her World Cup selection prospects no harm whatsoever with an in-ducker which swung through the defences of the in-form Sophie Devine, while Glenn returned later with another double-wicket over which put the brakes on Maddy Green’s bat-swinging.
“We’ve shifted to that really resilient and aggressive style – always looking to take the first punch – but without forcing it, doing it our way,” Glenn said. The 20-year-old Izzy Gaze – whose scores in the series prior to this match were 12, 0, 4, 0, 8 and 2 – finally showed up with a run-a-ball 25 which included smashing Ecclestone for six, breaking her bat in the process; but the damage was done.
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England continued with their dizzying line-up changes, trying out yet another opening combination before the World Cup – the third in four matches. The fact that Danni Wyatt and Sophia Dunkley put on a quickfire 54 in the opening five overs, laying the platform for England’s speedy finish, may simply add to Jon Lewis’s selection headaches as he attempts to figure out where both these two and Maia Bouchier might fit into his starting XI come October.
Dunkley top-edged a pull to Bates at cover in the sixth over while Wyatt fell shortly afterwards, but Knight and Sciver-Brunt hit a further flurry of boundaries to see England safely home.
New Zealand had chosen to bat first in the hope of making the most of a good batting track, but England were sharp on the ring and in the outfield, and though Plimmer and Bates both survived the powerplay intact for the first time this series, they rarely found the middle of the bat, managing just one boundary apiece. When series sponsors Vitality came up with the concept of the “Vitality Powerplayer”, they perhaps hadn’t quite envisaged it going to a batter (Plimmer) who had gone at a strike rate of just 85.
New Zealand still have one chance remaining to put points on the board on Wednesday at Lord’s, in the fifth and final T20 of the series. Normally, you would say they were playing for pride, but that particular bus seems to have already departed.
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