Seven Days After 214, Birmingham Phoenix Made 137 — and the Man Who Answered Them Was the One England Had Just Made Test Captain Again

Edgbaston on the first Saturday of August offered the most honest kind of cricket day: two matches on one square, and two entirely different verdicts on the same strip of grass. In the women's fixture the batting was fluent, the chase was tight, and the winning runs came with a single ball left. In the men's fixture the batting was anxious, the chase was serene, and the outcome stopped being in doubt somewhere around ball fifty-five. Same pitch, same afternoon, opposite temperaments.

The number that will follow Birmingham Phoenix out of this ground is 137 for 9. Seven days earlier, on this square, they had made 214 for 4 against Trent Rockets and it had not felt remarkable while it was happening. What makes 137 for 9 more troubling than the 100 all out at Old Trafford is that Old Trafford had an explanation — a gripping surface, Liam Dawson's accuracy, a batting order with no answer to slow left-arm. This had no such alibi. This was a flat Edgbaston deck in the afternoon sun, no dew to come, no excuse available, and a side that lost nine wickets making a total nobody would defend.

Welsh Fire won this on the strength of a bowling attack that never allowed the Phoenix innings to become a passage of cricket rather than a series of individual struggles. Marco Jansen and Lockie Ferguson took two wickets each, and the more instructive number is what they cost: 21 and 20 runs from twenty balls apiece, barely more than a run a ball at a ground where a run a ball is a defeat for the bowler. Between them they bowled forty of the hundred and conceded 41. That is not containment. That is a stranglehold with wickets attached.

What Phil Salt's attack did superbly was refuse to give the Phoenix a single passage to build from. Joe Clarke, who had made 68 from 33 here against the Rockets, got to 35 from 23 and was caught behind off Ferguson — a fine innings, ended before it became the innings. Mitchell Owen went at 53. Then the middle order simply stopped functioning: Laurie Evans run out for 1 in a mix-up that involved three Welsh Fire fielders, Rehan Ahmed run out for 13 four balls later, and Birmingham 79 for 5 with forty-one balls to bat and nobody set. Two run-outs in six deliveries is not a bowling triumph; it is a batting order losing its nerve in public.

Then came the chase, and with it the day's central performance. Joe Root walked out three days after the ECB confirmed his return to the England Test captaincy, and he batted like a man for whom 138 was a chore to be completed rather than a target to be attacked. Fifty from 34 balls. Seven fours. Not a single six. He simply placed the ball into gaps that a fielding side chasing the game kept leaving open, and he was there at the end on 58, having faced 40 of the 96 balls Welsh Fire needed.

Around him, Phil Salt provided the violence. His 46 from 36 contained four sixes and a single four — the profile of a batter with exactly one gear and total commitment to it — and the opening stand of 77 from 55 balls did most of the work. When Salt was lbw to Mitchell Owen with the score at 77, the target had already shrunk from imposing to arithmetic. Rachin Ravindra, whose 98 from 44 against MI London had been the innings of the tournament to that point, made 7 and was lbw to Chris Wood, and it did not matter in the slightest. That is what a functioning side looks like: the best player fails and nobody notices.

For Birmingham Phoenix the diagnosis is now harder to duck. Three defeats in a row. A net run rate of −1.208, comfortably the worst in the competition, which means that even if they win their remaining three matches the tiebreakers are already working against them. They sit eighth of eight. And the thing that should worry them most is not the 100 at Old Trafford or the 137 here, but the fact that their one great day — 214 against the Rockets — increasingly looks like the outlier rather than the standard. A batting order that can only score when everything is perfect is not a batting order; it is a weather forecast.

Be fair to them on one count: they did not choose an easy opponent for a reset. Welsh Fire's four-pronged attack of Woakes, Jansen, Ferguson and Cook is the most complete in the competition, and Ravindra's left-arm spin gives Salt a fifth option that most captains would take as a frontline choice. Very few batting orders in England were going to make 180 against that on Saturday. But 137 for 9, on this ground, with these boundaries, was below even the pessimistic estimate.

The women's match was the better contest and produced the day's best individual innings, and for a while it looked as though it would produce the wrong result for the home side. Georgia Voll made 78 from 55 balls with nine fours and two sixes, an innings of clean, uncomplicated hitting that carried Welsh Fire from a becalmed powerplay — 25 without loss from the first 25 balls — to a position where 144 was available. Sophie Devine then did what Devine does, taking 35 not out from 19 balls with three sixes at the death, and Welsh Fire finished with a total that looked eight or ten runs above par.

Birmingham Phoenix were 2 for 1 after five balls and 35 for 2 after 28. What followed was the passage of play that saved their season. Alice Capsey and Ellyse Perry added 86 for the third wicket, and the manner of it mattered as much as the size: fifty of those runs came from 30 balls, which in a hundred-ball innings is the difference between a chase that is alive and a chase that is over. Capsey made 51 from 29 with seven fours, her fifty raised in 28 balls, and when she fell to Voll's part-time bowling at 121 the equation was down to 24 from 18.

Perry finished it. She had reached her own fifty from 39 balls without hitting a six — seven fours, all placement and timing — and then found the boundary when it was needed most, taking Heather Graham's final set apart to get Phoenix home with a solitary ball to spare. Graham's figures, 0 for 34 from 19 balls, are the ledger entry of a bowler who was asked to hold the death overs against Ellyse Perry and could not. Few can.

The result gives Birmingham Phoenix Women their first win of the campaign, in front of 17,090 at Edgbaston, and lifts them off the bottom of a table where they had been marooned. It leaves Welsh Fire Women seventh. In a competition where Southern Brave have won all five, the mid-table sides need every one of these one-ball finishes to fall their way — and this one, at last, did.

On the pitch itself: Edgbaston played true all day and did not deserve the men's total that appeared on it. The women's match produced 289 runs for 6 wickets across 199 balls; the men's produced 275 for 12 across 196. That is a surface that gave the batters what they needed on both occasions. Lauren Filer's 0 for 15 from 20 balls in the afternoon and Ferguson's 2 for 20 in the evening were the two spells that suggested pace and accuracy could still be rewarded, but neither was extracting anything sinister. There was no dew factor in either fixture — a 3pm start for the men and an earlier one for the women — which removed the one variable that skews Edgbaston evenings. Both totals were built or squandered on merit.

Our preview leaned to Welsh Fire, and the reasoning has held up better than we might have expected. We wrote that Welsh Fire's four-man attack gave Salt "four different ways to take wickets and four different problems for the Phoenix batting order to solve," and that this batting order "struggles to solve more than one problem at a time." Jansen and Ferguson took two apiece for 41 between them from forty balls, and Birmingham lost nine wickets. We also wrote that on a surface where the ball does nothing, "Welsh Fire win narrowly, because Ravindra and Root at the top are good enough to post 155 on any surface in England." Root got there. Ravindra made 7. Half a prediction is still a prediction.

Two things we got wrong, and both are worth owning. First, a factual error: we described Welsh Fire as arriving "unbeaten." They were not. They had lost to Trent Rockets by nine wickets on July 29, and that should have been in the preview. Second, we flagged Joe Clarke as the home-ground talisman who could make 70 again and Chris Woakes as an emotional subplot returning to his own ground. Clarke top-scored with 35 and was gone before he could change the match; Woakes went for 34 from his twenty balls and took a single wicket. Neither call was wrong in kind — Clarke was Birmingham's best batter and Woakes did take a wicket — but we asked them both to be decisive and neither was.

The women's fixture we did not preview, and the reason to regret that is Alice Capsey. Her 51 from 29 was the innings that made Perry's possible, and a preview would have had every reason to flag her.

Welsh Fire go to 12 points from four matches, level with Trent Rockets at the top but second on net run rate, with Southern Brave, Manchester Super Giants and Sunrisers Leeds to come — the hardest remaining schedule of the front-runners. Their next assignment is the Brave at Sophia Gardens, and the question they carry into it is whether a batting order that has now leaned on Root and Salt in consecutive weeks can survive Ravindra's continued quiet spell. Birmingham Phoenix, meanwhile, face Trent Rockets, Sunrisers Leeds and London Spirit, and need to win all three while repairing a net run rate of −1.208 that may already have decided their tournament.

In the women's competition, Southern Brave remain unbeaten at five from five and the rest are playing for the two places behind them. Birmingham Phoenix Women's first win moves them to six points and, more usefully, begins the repair of a net run rate of −2.184 that has been the real damage. Perry and Capsey batting together is the most watchable thing they have. On Saturday it was also the most effective.