four-wicket victory<\/a> to inflict a first defeat of the campaign on the Brave.<\/p>\nThe Welsh side suffered the loss of Devine – the joint most expensive women’s player in the tournament – on Sunday but Grace Thompson produced the goods on debut to score 16 when the game was in the balance.<\/p>\n
“To come in for her first ever Hundred game and hit the ball so cleanly was phenomenal,” said Australia all-rounder Graham.<\/p>\n
“To be able to do that on your debut is pretty special and she’s a talent. We’ve got to watch out for England cricket in the years to come because she’s a very good player, the same with Niamh (Holland).”<\/p>\n
After Thompson’s dismissal, responsibility was passed to 21-year-old Niamh Holland to help Graham secure just their second victory of the Hundred so far.<\/p>\n
The Somerset all-rounder held her nerve with a swift 12 before Graham secured the win with a single off the final ball.<\/p>\n
“She knew what she wanted to do and was really calm and clear. I tried to help her out and just tell her to stay calm,” said Graham.<\/p>\n
Fire moved to fourth and could boost their play-off hopes with victory at Old Trafford against third-placed Manchester Super Giants on Wednesday, 5 August (11:30 BST).<\/p>\n
Australian international Graham hopes defeating the leaders in dramatic fashion can boost their bid to reach the play-offs for a third time.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had a couple of close games and have been on the losing side, so to be able to do that one and take home the chocolates was pretty good,” she said.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to take a lot of confidence away from this and hopefully can get another win up there as well.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welsh Fire might have lost captain Sophie Devine to injury but their young talent stepped up in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":727452,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-727796","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\/727796","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=727796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/727452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}