Durham upset the form book to beat Hampshire Hawks by four wickets and reach the final of the Vitality Women’s Blast at the Oval as Heather Graham played a match-winning hand with the bat.<\/p>\n
The Hawks were favourites to set up a showdown with The Blaze having finished top of the table and nine points clear of their fourth-placed opponents, but were overshadowed by a superb all-round performance from Durham.<\/p>\n
After being asked to bat, Hampshire seemed to be building towards a challenging total at 49-1 in the sixth over, but the loss of five wickets for 40 runs, including that of captain Georgia Adams (15) set the tone as Sophia Turner (3-21) and Katy Levick (1-18) chipped away.<\/p>\n
Naomi Dattani was the mainstay of the Hampshire innings, scoring an unbeaten 28 from 22 balls, with Ella McCaughan (23) the only other batter to get into the 20s, but a total of 129-8 always looked well within reach of Durham.<\/p>\n
That proved to be the case with skipper Hollie Armitage (23) and Mady Villiers (25) sharing a 52-run partnership for the opening wicket, but when both were dismissed in the space of seven deliveries the nerves began to appear in the north-east side’s batting line-up.<\/p>\n
Bess Heath (8), Emily Windsor (1) and Mia Rogers (8) all fell to reduce them to 93-5, leaving Hampshire sensing there was an opportunity to exert enough pressure to get out of trouble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Durham upset the form book to beat Hampshire Hawks by four wickets and reach the final of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-697633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}