2:45 AM IST and 10:15 PM Local Time: PHEW! What an encounter we have witnessed at The Rose Bowl, Southampton! Both the teams were not ready to give up till the final over of the game and the game swung like a pendulum. At the end, Hampshire Hawks won the game with just a delivery to spare. This is their sixth victory on the trot and they sit firmly at the helm of the points table.
Winning the toss, Yorkshire opted to bat first. They were off to a shoddy start as they lost both their openers, Jonny Bairstow and Adam Lyth cheaply. Both the batters struggled for fluency and threw their wickets away. In the first five overs, they were going exactly at run-a-ball and that's where William Luxton and Sam Whiteman decided to take the run rate up a bit. They registered 45 runs for the 3rd wicket when Luxton was dismissed for 37. Luxton-Whiteman found it challenging initially but found a few occasional boundaries to keep the scoreboard moving.
Luxton's wicket snatched the momentum from Yorkshire and they lost Sam Whiteman soon after. Moeen Ali and Matthew Revis became Chris Wood's victim and the team score was 96/6 in the 15th over. Andrew Tye came in and he started a blitzkrieg. Faheem Ashraf became just an anchor at the other end and Tye scored the bulk of the runs. Tye took on the Hampshire pacers to the cleaners. Sonny Baker got hit for a hat-trick of maximums in the 18th over and then conceded another maximum in the final over against him. Before being dismissed in the last over, Tye hit 2 fours and 5 sixes to score 44 off 17 balls to help his side get to a competitive score of 150 runs.
For the Hampshire, their pacers were absolutely top-notch. Chris Wood picked up 3 wickets for 23 runs. Scott Currie picked up 3 wickets for 31. Sonny Baker took 2 wickets for 40. He was a bit expensive today. James Fuller removed William Luxton.
Hampshire came to chase the 151-run target and lost Toby Albert in the first over. But James Vince and Joe Weatherley took the onus and carried the innings forward. The second wicket's partnership was of 59 runs, out of which Vince contributed just 14. Weatherley was lucky a couple of times against Daniel Moriarty but he made sure no opportunity went begging. He hit anything loose for boundaries and catapulted the score.
Moriarty started the fight back as he removed Vince in the final over of the powerplay. Then he came back to bowl his third over and took the wickets of Liam Dawson and Ben Mayes in two consecutive deliveries. Weatherley got to his fifty in 26 balls and hit a hat-trick of boundaries to Jafer Chouhan after that but his ambition became his enemy. In the final ball of that over, his heave found Andrew Tye. But the 63-run innings he played was a decisive one.
Yorkshire got Tristan Stubbs and Hilton Cartwright in the crease and both of them employed a cautious approach. They put up 35 runs in 37 balls in their partnership before Hilton got out for 19. Hampshire lost James Fuller and Scott Currie after that. The threat of Tristan Stubbs running out of partners was looming over their heads and Chris Wood came in. Stubbs-Wood pair took the game to the final over when 8 runs were required. First three balls yielded only 2 runs and then Wood finished things off with a boundary and a maximum.
Andrew Tye almost single-handedly kept Yorkshire in the game today. The Australian pacer played a belligerent knock with the bat earlier and then he picked up 3 wickets for 36 runs. But he erred in his line and length at a very wrong time and that cost the match. Daniel Moriarty pulled things back for Yorkshire when the pair of Vince and Weatherley was looking ominous. He finished with 3/27. Hasan Ali and Jafer Chohan picked up a wicket each.