Cricket is an organic experience. Players wander around a green field, their day unfolding subject to the vagaries of sun and rain, time and tide. Before the Women’s Ashes Test here, the greenness of the pitch stood out, the freshness of the air, making the England captain, Heather Knight, want to bowl. Then into this pastoral scene came Australia: the rise of the machines.
If you’re not up to date with your Terminator references, fair enough. But that describes their style and they followed it again. Win the toss. Bat first. Start piling up runs. Win everything in sight at all costs.
The Australia women’s team is beyond being a sequel; by now, even their Test iteration is a franchise. They are world cricket’s antagonists, appearing again and again, and even when the cast has a few new faces they bring the same relentlessness.
Such as where the regular captain, Meg Lanning, drops out of this series, Phoebe Litchfield slots straight in. Barely past her 20th birthday, opening the batting, cracking a series of square drives to the fence before the more experienced Beth Mooney had fired a shot. Litchfield’s only error was not reviewing an incorrect lbw decision when she looked destined to go on.
The next knock-on from Lanning’s absence meant Ellyse Perry needing to take her usual spot at first drop, the first foray there for a player who has done most of her work at No 4. As usual, Perry picked up where she left off. If we stretch the film analogy and ignore most characteristics, Perry is the Schwarzenegger of the enterprise: ever-present across the years, tireless, determined to plough on with her work to the exclusion of all other considerations.
It was Perry, after Litchfield’s exit, who shaped the day, batting either side of a rain delay to within minutes of the scheduled close, falling one run short of a third Test century. Missing the milestone will be galling, but not going into the second day to bat far bigger will annoy Perry more than the stats column. This is a player in her 11th Test with a bewildering batting average of 77.36.
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The only moments of challenge came from the debutant Lauren Filer to top and tail Perry’s innings. A bolter into the Test squad who then won selection, it was soon evident what the England management like. Filer, who starts her approach to the crease like an Olympic race walker before breaking into a run, had a surprise factor beyond her approach.
It wasn’t just her first ball that swung in and attacked the pads, back leg and clean in front, only denied a dismissal when Perry’s review showed an inside edge. It was extra pace off the pitch that had a startled Perry playing a back‑foot defence off the sticker, the sort of shot she would rarely be called upon to use. It was following that with swing away from the bat.
When Filer ran out of puff, Perry’s only competition was with herself. She duelled with her own stats, her live average reaching 83.8 by the time her score passed it with a glide to the boundary just after the afternoon’s long rain delay.
Perry bats like a player who ate the coaching manual. Her customary defensive poise, a feature of her rare outings in this format, was punctuated with technically pure shots for four, ticking along at a strike rate in the 60s where her other big scores have more often been in the 40s.
Surrey's Will Jacks (pictured) hit five sixes in an over on his way to 96 from 45 balls, but Middlesex replied with a record-breaking chase to win their Vitality Blast clash by seven wickets at the Oval.
The hosts posted a mammoth 252 for seven, but Stephen Eskinazi and Max Holden both hit rapid half-centuries as Middlesex pulled off the highest chase in Blast history and the second highest in T20 matches around the world.
Eskinazi got the innings of to a flyer, hitting 73 from 39 balls, including 90 in just 6.3 overs with opening partner Joe Cracknell, who made 36 off 16.
Holden then took Middlesex over the line with an unbeaten 68 off 35 balls, while Ryan Higgins smacked 48 off 24. Incredibly, it was Middlesex's first win in 15 T20 games, stretching back to last summer.
Jacks had earlier shared an extraordinary opening stand of 177 in a mere 12.4 overs with Laurie Evans, whose own contribution was an explosive 37-ball 85.
Harrison Ward's quick-fire half-century helped Sussex Sharks to a comfortable seven-wicket win over Gloucestershire in Bristol.
The 23-year-old slogged 51 from 27 balls, including five sixes and two fours, with his opening partnership of 83 with Tom Clark proving vital as they reached their target of 141 with 6.4 overs to spare. PA Media
Mooney had earlier coughed up a catch for 33, and Tahlia McGrath was bowled by a Sophie Ecclestone gem for 61, but each had offered Perry a good span of support. When Alyssa Healy was bowled by Ecclestone second ball after Jess Jonassen had gloved a catch to short-leg, perhaps that disrupted the mechanism.
Three overs later, with Filer back on, Perry twice threw her bat at width. The first just evaded gully for four, to move her to 99. The second one found Nat Sciver‑Brunt in exactly that spot. Neither were the kind of shot she had attempted previously and Filer’s pace and aggression brought reward.
If Kyle Reese taught us anything in a certain cinematic release from 1984, enough speed and enough explosiveness can even bring down a cyborg. The surge did help England keep touch with the game, but it came after 238 runs that had been racked up at four an over. And Australia being Australia, taking down the top six meant that you have to deal with seven and eight.
Ash Gardner counterattacked, Annabel Sutherland collected, and the scoreboard ticked past 300, even as Ecclestone continued in an admirable spell that created regular jeopardy.
That’s the problem with movie antagonists. You throw whatever you have at them, but they can always come back.
