Southern Brave became the first team to win all of their group games in The Hundred as they warmed up for Sunday’s final with a 29-run victory over Welsh Fire.<\/p>\n
Brave, already guaranteed to finish top and therefore progress directly to Lord’s, made only 106-8 batting first but applied the squeeze as bottom-of-the-table Fire crumbled in pursuit of 107.<\/p>\n
The visitors reached 50-1 from 55 balls before Tammy Beaumont holed out for a 33-ball 28, having taken only six singles from her previous 14 balls.<\/p>\n
Jess Jonassen hit Lauren Bell to deep cover four balls later and only one boundary had come in 33 balls when Hayley Matthews was caught at deep mid-wicket in the next set. Fire lost their last eight wickets for 27 runs to end on 77-9.<\/p>\n
England seamer Bell took two wickets in the last three balls to finish with remarkable figures of 4-6 and take her tally to 19 in the tournament – the most in a women’s Hundred season.<\/p>\n
Brave’s spinners were also hard to hit on a slow and turning pitch, as captain Georgia Adams claimed 1-8 from 15 balls.<\/p>\n
Adams was earlier her side’s highest scorer with 30 not out in their batting struggle.<\/p>\n
Brave fiddled with their batting order, dropping Sophie Devine down to number eight to give others time in the middle, but lost regular wickets throughout.<\/p>\n
Danni Wyatt-Hodge made 24 and Freya Kemp 18 – the only other batters to make double figures.<\/p>\n
Brave, chasing their second women’s Hundred title, will play the winners of Saturday’s Eliminator between Northern Superchargers and London Spirit.<\/p>\n
Last year’s runners-up Fire finish bottom of the table with only one win from eight matches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Southern Brave became the first team to win all of their group games in The Hundred as they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-99358","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\/99358","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=99358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}