Santner Takes Five for Sixteen and Ross Adair Hits 24 Off 7 — Edinburgh Beat Dublin With 38 Balls Left

Mitchell Santner has been playing international cricket for a decade and has never made a great deal of noise about it. He bowls left-arm orthodox at a pace that gives batters just enough time to make a mistake, he fields brilliantly, and he captains sides that do not always have the players to justify his optimism. At Voorburg on Sunday evening he produced the best figures of the ETPL so far — 4-0-16-5 — and then walked out at number eight with the chase already won and hit three not out.

Dublin Guardians will look back at 54 for 2 in the seventh over and wonder how they got from there to 109 all out. The answer is not a collapse in the conventional sense; it is that Santner bowled his four overs in the middle of the innings and Dublin had nobody who could get him away. From the moment James Vince chipped a return catch to him at 60 for 4, the innings became a queue.

Five for sixteen from four overs, and not one of them a tail-ender's wicket in the ordinary sense. Santner had James Vince caught and bowled for 40 — Dublin's top scorer, set, and the one batter looking capable of taking the game away. He had Daryl Mitchell lbw for 3. He had Ben Calitz lbw for 4. He had George Dockrell lbw for 2. And he came back at the end to have Matt Hollard caught by Trent Boult at 104.

Three lbws in a T20 innings from a spinner is a statistic that describes a very specific kind of bowling: quicker, flatter, into the pads, daring the batter to work it to leg. On a used surface at Voorburg with the ball skidding on, Dublin's middle order kept trying to hit through the line and kept missing. Santner's economy — four an over on a ground where 183 was scored the previous afternoon — is arguably the more impressive half of the figures.

Around him, Edinburgh's attack did not let anything go. Trent Boult took the first and the last wickets. Tom Curran, Jack Jarvis and JJ Smuts took one each. Six bowlers used, five of them took wickets, and not one of the six went at more than seven an over.

Dublin chose to bat and were 49 for 2 after the powerplay, which is a fine platform. Muhammad Waseem had gone early to Boult and Harry Tector was bowled by Jack Jarvis for 4, but James Vince was in and playing well — five fours and a six in his 40 from 30.

From 54 for 2 in the seventh over they lost 4 for 11. Mitchell lbw, Vince caught and bowled, Calitz lbw, Dockrell lbw — four wickets in the space of twenty-one deliveries, all four to Santner. At 65 for 6 in the eleventh over the innings needed rebuilding by two batters, and the two available were Sanjay Krishnamurthi and Ravichandran Ashwin.

They added 18 in the best part of four overs, which was the correct instinct and the wrong arithmetic. Ashwin was caught for 8 from 12 and Krishnamurthi, who had made 24 from 24 and been Dublin's most sensible batter, was caught off Smuts in the sixteenth. The last three wickets produced 26 runs. One hundred and nine on a ground where scores have been substantially higher all week was never going to be defended, and to Dublin's credit they seemed to know it — Josh Little was bowled having a swing at the last ball of the eighteenth over.

Chases of 110 are supposed to be careful. Ross Adair evidently had other plans. Three fours and two sixes from the first over and a bit — 24 runs from seven balls at a strike rate of 342 — and Edinburgh were 25 for 1 before the first over was complete, because Adair holed out to Harry Tector off Chris Wood on the last ball of it.

It was the perfect T20 cameo: entirely reckless, entirely correct, and over before it could go wrong. Andries Gous was caught first ball in the second over and Brandon McMullen hit a six and was lbw to Dockrell in the third, and at 46 for 3 inside three overs there was a version of this chase that got complicated. JJ Smuts made sure it did not — 33 from 24 with four fours, the calm innings that the top of the order had made possible by scoring 46 in fifteen balls.

George Dockrell bowled beautifully for 3 for 27, removing McMullen, Laurie Evans and Gareth Delany in a genuine attempt to make a game of it. It got Edinburgh down to 106 for 6 in the thirteenth over — four runs still needed, and four wickets already gone in the chase. Tom Curran and Santner knocked them off, and Edinburgh finished with 38 deliveries unused.

This was the second match of the day at Sportpark Westvliet, following the rain-shortened five-over game in the afternoon, and the difference in the surface was obvious. The earlier match went at better than thirteen an over across 8.5 overs; this one produced 219 runs in 31.4 with sixteen wickets falling.

The ball gripped for the spinners — Santner's five, Dockrell's three, Ashwin's four overs for twenty — and the seamers who tried to bowl full were punished while those who hit the deck were not. Dublin's decision to bat first was reasonable on a surface likely to slow further, and it might have worked if anyone beyond Vince had scored freely. As it was, 109 was fifty short of a contest.

This match did not have a CricIntel preview, so there is no call of ours to grade here. We did write after Dublin's defeat to Glasgow the previous day that Harry Tector was carrying too much of their batting; on this evidence the concern is broader than Tector — he made 4, and the innings still fell over around a top-scorer's 40. We will have a full preview for Dublin's next fixture.

Edinburgh Castle Rockers go top of the ETPL table, and they are doing it with a balance most sides in this competition do not have: Boult and Curran with the new ball, Santner and Mark Watt through the middle, Smuts as a genuine all-rounder, and a top order that can score 46 in fifteen balls when the situation calls for it. Six bowlers used, six wickets shared, and a chase completed inside fourteen overs.

Dublin Guardians are sixth and have now lost twice in two days. The batting has real names — Vince, Tector, Daryl Mitchell, Dockrell — and none of them has produced a match-defining innings yet. Ashwin's four overs for twenty was the most economical full spell either side bowled in the second innings and he is being asked to hold an attack together while the batting keeps handing him nothing to defend. They meet Rotterdam on September 2, and they need somebody to bat twenty overs before then.