Rockers Win by Seven Wickets — Boult's 5-24 Is the ETPL's First Five-For and Glasgow Never Reach 120

New leagues take a while to find their first great individual performance. The European T20 Premier League needed three matches. Trent Boult, 37 years old and playing his cricket now in fortnights rather than seasons, took the new ball at Sportpark Westvliet on Thursday evening, had Jason Roy caught by Gareth Delany in his first over, and came back at the death to remove the last two batters in the final over of the innings. Five for 24 from four overs — the first five-wicket haul in the competition's history, and the reason Glasgow Cosmic never got near a defendable score.

Edinburgh Castle Rockers won by seven wickets with 51 balls remaining. Glasgow's 115 was passed inside twelve overs. On a ground where the first two matches of the tournament had both produced totals above 155, that is not a bad night — it is a different sport being played by one of the two teams.

Boult's five is worth breaking down, because it was not one spell. Roy went to the fourth ball of the match, caught by Gareth Delany for a three-ball duck. Richie Berrington, who had made 28 from 27 and was Glasgow's one settled batter, was caught by Jack Jarvis at 90 for 7 in the eighteenth over, and two balls later Ali Khan was caught by Ross Adair for a duck in the same over. Then, in the last over of the innings, Paul van Meekeren was caught and bowled for 8 and Lungi Ngidi was lbw next ball to end it on 115. One wicket with the fourth ball of the match and four in the last three overs — the two phases a left-arm swing bowler is picked for, delivered on the same night at a cost of six an over.

He was not alone. JJ Smuts, an off-spinner batting as an opener at the other end of the night, took 3-0-12-2 and produced the passage that broke Glasgow's middle: Liam Livingstone stumped by Andries Gous for 17 off the first ball of the thirteenth over and Michael Leask lbw off the second. Glasgow went from 66 for 4 to 66 for 6 in two deliveries. Mitchell Santner bowled his four for 17 and had Moises Henriques lbw; Tom Curran went for 17 from three without reward. Six Edinburgh bowlers used, five of them at seven an over or less.

Glasgow's problem was not one collapse but the absence of any partnership at all. Their best partnership of the innings was 25, for the ninth wicket. George Munsey, the captain, was run out by Santner for 9. Matthew Cross was bowled by Jarvis for 8. Nineteen for 3 in the fifth over became 42 for 4 in the eighth and 66 for 6 in the thirteenth, and by the time Keshav Maharaj — a specialist spinner batting at eight — started hitting fours from the back end of the innings, the total on offer was a matter of dignity rather than competition. Maharaj's unbeaten 29 from 27 was the top score. That sentence is the whole of Glasgow's evening.

Their 115 came at 5.75 an over on a surface where the previous two matches had gone at 7.85 and 9.20. They faced their full twenty overs and were bowled out on the last ball of them.

Edinburgh's chase was over as a contest before the powerplay ended: 70 for 2 after six overs, 50 up inside four. Ross Adair hit three fours and two sixes in 12 balls for 28 and was caught at 67 in the sixth over having already made the target irrelevant. JJ Smuts hit four fours in a nine-ball 16, which meant that the man who had taken two wickets in the middle overs had also opened the batting and struck at 177. Brandon McMullen made 23 from 16, and Andries Gous — the wicketkeeper, unbeaten on 40 from 28 with six fours and a six — was there at the end with Laurie Evans.

Glasgow's bowling in those 11.3 overs was as ragged as their batting had been. Ali Khan went for 29 from two overs and Paul van Meekeren for 23 from one. Maharaj, Ngidi and Livingstone each took a wicket and each went at under 8.50, which on this night qualifies as resistance.

Three matches into the ETPL, the pattern at Sportpark Westvliet is becoming legible: the new ball is the most valuable commodity in the tournament. Seventeen wickets have now fallen inside the first six overs of an innings across the competition's opening three fixtures — an average of nearly three per powerplay. What Edinburgh did differently from Dublin earlier in the day was take the pace off in the middle overs — Smuts and Santner bowled seven overs between them for 29 and took three wickets, and Glasgow's batters, having survived Boult, found the slower surface just as hard to score on.

The match award went to Boult and there was no argument to be had. A left-armer swinging the new ball is a familiar problem for international batters; the same bowler in Dutch evening conditions, against a batting order that has been together for a fortnight, is an unfair one. But the more instructive performance may have been Smuts's: 16 with the bat as an opener, then 3-0-12-2 with off-spin in the middle overs. In a league of squads assembled a fortnight ago, the players who do two jobs are going to decide who qualifies.

This fixture did not have a CricIntel preview — the ETPL is three matches old and we are still assembling a model for it rather than making calls we cannot back. Previews will follow as the tournament's own data accumulates, and we will be straightforward about what we get right and wrong.

Edinburgh take two points and, more usefully at this stage, a net run rate built by chasing 116 in 11.3 overs. Glasgow are bottom, and their problem is more structural than a bad night: Munsey, Roy, Cross, Livingstone, Henriques and Berrington is a top six with a great deal of T20 experience in it and no obvious anchor, and on a slow surface that is exactly the profile that gets bowled out for 115. They meet Dublin next — the other side beaten out of sight on Thursday — in what has already become, three days into a new league, a match neither can afford to lose.