When Nat Sciver-Brunt put UP in a spin

Moments after Mumbai Indians secured their 2023 Women's Premier League final berth on the back of her scintillating knock of 72*, Nat Sciver-Brunt walked up to her English teammates near the UP Warriorz's dugout and said a polite 'thank you' to Sophie Ecclestone.

It was the last ball of the batting powerplay after Warriorz captain Alyssa Healy had put MI in to bat first on a "belter of a track" in the WPL Eliminator. Since their brisk start, Mumbai had slipped to 31/1 in the beginning of the fifth over, bringing Sciver-Brunt in. They would've been further reduced to 45/2 had Ecclestone held on to the reverse-cupped attempt at mid-off when her England vice-captain tried to loft one over her head. Sciver-Brunt was on six off three balls then. Off the next 35 she would face in the remainder of MI's innings, the Englishwoman collected 66 more game-changing runs - the highlight of which was the batting clinic she put up against arguably the tournament's best spin unit.

Friday's Eliminator had always been billed as a who-blinks-first contest between a side that, at one point, had all its top-four in the Orange Cap race and other boasting of an enviable spin attack that had really come into its own once the pitches slowed down. In fact, the last seven league games at Navi Mumbai's DY Patil Sports Academy had been won by sides chasing with only one side posting a total of 150. MI themselves were twice guilty of having posted sub-par scores batting first, losing both games comprehensively to find themselves in the Eliminator in the first place. Faced with the challenge of posting a defendable total after yet again losing a crucial toss, it was Mumbai's most expensive buy at the WPL player auction - and joint most expensive overseas player in the league - who showed the way.

Just as a young Parshavi Chopra was beginning to dominate - having struck with her first ball to take out a well-set Hayley Matthews and outfoxing Harmanpreet Kaur with her googly - Sciver-Brunt unsettled the legspinner with 4, 4, 6, 4 in the next four deliveries across her two-over spell. The first four was struck powerfully down the ground. The other two were off short balls, brilliantly pulled and punished, while in between was a preemptive shimmy down the track to get to the pitch of a generously flighted delivery and smoke it to the left of the sightscreen. The flurry of boundary hits allowed her captain to settle in.

In Mumbai's first defeat of the season, at the hands of Warriorz, the troika of Ecclestone, Deepti Sharma and Rajeshwari Gayakwad had spun a web with combined figures of 7 for 66 in 12 overs to expose the truth behind MI's (under-tested) batting depth. Ecclestone had won the brief battle with Sciver-Brunt by trapping her LBW cheaply on just 5. Tonight, the allrounder nailed an extra cover drive with textbook perfection to reach a 26-ball fifty.

This was preceded by a brief three-over period where Ecclestone's dismissal of Harmanpreet and another couple of tight overs was bringing back flashbacks of MI's recent batting-first collapses. But from a precarious 109/3 at the end of 14th over , Sciver-Brunt had decided to step up when her captain, and one of the best punishers of spin on the circuit currently, couldn't make her start count.

The successive boundaries off Gayakwad in the 17th over had class written all over them - an inside-out over extra cover with the turn followed by a precisely placed pull to midwicket that perfectly threaded the gap on the legside. She spearheaded the partnerships with Melie Kerr (29 off 19) and Pooja Vastrakar (11* off 4) to collect 73 in the death overs, taking MI to a formidable 182/4 with a last-ball six as she wrapped up by depositing a hit-me slot ball from Deepti over long-on.

Sixty-five of Sciver-Brunt's 72 runs came against the five spinners Healy deployed, in 33 deliveries off which only four were dots. The English allrounder hit eight out of her nine boundaries and both her sixes off the slower-bowlers, going at a strike-rate of 197 (as compared to her tournament S/R of 139) to bat Warriorz out of the contest at the halfway mark. At the end, the combined report card of Warriorz's experienced spin trio told the match story - 12-0-114-2, an average economy of 9.5 that had shot up from 7.65 in the league stages. Young Chopra and part-timer Harris's numbers of 5-0-45-1 only made it worse.

It wasn't the most outrageous, unorthodox batting. Mumbai perhaps couldn't afford it either with a fragile lower-middle order to follow. It didn't even feature her trademark Natmeg shot, or an abundance of sweeps she usually plays well against spin. But it had enough power in it to knock the wind out of UPW's sails. It was an effort reminiscent of her 42-ball 50 in England's crucial 11-run victory over India in the recently concluded T20 World Cup in South Africa. Only this time, the runs off Indian spinners wouldn't have pinched Harmanpreet.

On a pitch that offered swing right until the second innings, as Issy Wong would go on to show later, Warriorz also perhaps played it into Sciver-Brunt's hands by not bowling more than the three overs of pace of Anjali Sarvani even when they had Tahlia McGrath on the field and an experienced Shabnim Ismail in the dugout. Alyssa Healy, however, strongly supported the team selection, as well as their decision to bowl first backing her side's strengths.

"T-Mac [Tahlia McGrath] was probably an option, but I'd back our spinners to do the job nine times out of 10. We probably just didn't quite execute as much at the backend," said losing captain Healy, who was celebrating her 33rd birthday.

"It's also really hard to have someone like Shabnim Ismail sitting on the bench for us. But at the moment, the way that we're set up, we needed the extra batter so it's a tough thing having four internationals [only]. Yes, Shabs would have been amazing today to have but unfortunately we couldn't do that. But I'd bet the six bowlers that we used tonight to get the job done more often than not and I thought they executed for probably 15 of 20 overs and then things just sort of got away from us at the end."

As the opposition keeper, Healy has had the worst best-seat in the house to watch some of Sciver-Brunt's finest knocks in the recent past, including the twin centuries against Australia in the 2022 ODI World Cup.

"She's just a classy looking batter. She doesn't ever try anything too outlandish. She just plays nice and straight plays on the ground most of the time and it gets the job done for a team, which is probably the most the most amazing aspect of her cricket - that in those big moments, she stands up for her team," said the 33-year-old, highlighting the ICC Player of the Year's all-round brilliance.

Sciver-Brunt returned with the ball in hand to dismiss the destructive Harris cheaply in the eighth over - a batter, who among the top-10 to have scored over a 100 runs in the middle-overs (7-15) phase was yet to be dismissed in that period. A little while later, she held on to a fine boundary-line catch to put an end to Kiran Navgire's fireworks that were keeping the faint hopes alive for the Warriorz despite the top-order collapse.

Wong killed whatever life was left in that chase with the tournament's first hat-trick in the 13th over - also the first-ever from a Mumbai Indians player, male or female. But it was Sciver-Brunt's fine batting masterclass against spin that had put the team in a commanding position with an above-par total, winning her the Player of the Match award ahead of her history-making teammate.

"Oh, Nat deserves it," Wong told the broadcaster after MI progressed to the final. "She really held that innings together for us. We got a big total on the board which we can go out and be really aggressive with the ball and defend - all down to Nat. She thoroughly deserves it."

All of which would have perhaps not been possible without that costly miss from Ecclestone.

"She would usually take those, you know. Just luck of the draw, unfortunately," Sciver-Brunt said in the defence of English teammate, before moonwalking her way out of the post-match presentation ceremony and into the WPL 2023 final.