Twenty-Four Hours After Rescuing an Innings, Brandon McMullen Simply Took One Apart

There is a version of Sunday afternoon at Sportpark Westvliet in which Glasgow Cosmic finally win a cricket match. They were 72 for 3 in the twelfth over and rebuilt to 159 for 6. Liam Livingstone and Richie Berrington added 55 in 28 balls. They had Ross Adair caught in the third over of the chase and JJ Smuts bowled in the fifth, and Edinburgh Castle Rockers were 28 for 2 with eighteen of the twenty overs unbowled and their two most destructive names — Delany and Santner — not yet required.

Then Brandon McMullen and Andries Gous put on 108 in nine overs, and the game stopped being a contest at roughly the halfway mark of the chase.

Edinburgh have now played six, won five, lost none, and had one abandoned. They lead the ETPL by four points with a net run rate of 2.566, which is not merely the best in the competition but better than the other five sides combined would manage on their best day. Glasgow have lost five in a row.

Glasgow's innings is a lesson in the difference between contributions and an innings. Jason Roy 20 from 21. Finn Allen 9 from 13. George Munsey 31 from 24 with five fours. Liam Livingstone 36 from 30. Four batters reached double figures before the seventeenth over and not one of them reached forty. Against an attack containing Trent Boult, Tom Curran, Mark Watt and Mitchell Santner, that is not a coincidence — it is what happens when every over is bowled by somebody who has done this at international level.

The passage that made the total was the fourth-wicket stand: Livingstone and Richie Berrington adding 50 in 28 balls and 55 in all, taking Glasgow from 72 for 3 to 127 in the seventeenth. Berrington's 38 from 20 — two fours, three sixes — was the fastest of Glasgow's innings and the reason 159 was on the board rather than 135.

Trent Boult ended both of them, Livingstone caught by Laurie Evans off the last ball of the seventeenth and Berrington bowled in the nineteenth, and Edinburgh's death bowling did what it has done all tournament: from 127 for 3 at the end of the seventeenth, Glasgow added 32 in the last three overs and lost three wickets doing it. Boult 2 for 31, Curran 2 for 29, Watt 1 for 27. Santner, the captain, was the only Rocker to concede more than eight an over, and he still had Roy caught and bowled.

Glasgow's opening was genuinely good. Oliver Davidson had Ross Adair — who had hit three sixes in eleven balls and looked like ending the contest inside the powerplay — caught by Berrington in the third over, then bowled JJ Smuts in the fifth. Twenty-eight for 2. Edinburgh's powerplay finished at 52 for 2, and Glasgow had two of the three wickets that mattered.

The third never came. Andries Gous and Brandon McMullen reached fifty for the stand in 31 balls and a hundred in 61, and the shape of it tells you how it was done: Gous 43 of that first hundred, McMullen 57, and not a single extra in it. No wides, no byes, no gifts. Just two batters taking a boundary an over off an attack whose fifth and sixth bowlers — Reuben Wilson and Paul van Meekeren — went for 46 and 16 in six overs between them.

McMullen reached fifty from 28 balls with six fours and a six and simply kept going: 82 not out from 47, eight fours, three sixes, a strike rate of 174.46, and no dismissal. He hit the winning runs. Twenty-four hours earlier, on the same square, he had made 37 from 28 in a rescue job that dragged his side from 14 for 3 to a defendable 148. Two nights, two entirely different jobs, both done.

Gous fell four short of a deserved fifty, lbw to Lungi Ngidi at 136 for 3 in the sixteenth, with 24 needed from 25 balls. Laurie Evans came in and faced seven deliveries. It was over in the nineteenth.

Sportpark Westvliet gave 322 runs for nine wickets on Sunday — a day after the same square produced 241 for twenty in the Rotterdam–Edinburgh match. That is a striking swing, and the temptation is to call it a different surface. It is more honest to say it was a different time of day and a different new-ball spell. Saturday's game was played under evening conditions where the ball swung; Sunday's was a late-morning start, and neither new ball did much after the first three overs.

The chase went at 8.57 an over. The defence went at 7.95. Edinburgh's advantage was not the pitch — it was the depth behind the front four. Jack Jarvis, the fifth bowler, sent down three overs for 22. Glasgow's fifth and sixth options, Reuben Wilson and Paul van Meekeren, cost 62 in six between them, and 46 of that came from Wilson alone. In a competition where every side fields four or five internationals, the gap keeps arriving from the bowlers whose names are not on the team sheet's first line.

This match didn't have a CricIntel preview, so there is no verdict to grade. What there is, though, is a call we made in writing on Saturday night, and it is worth putting on the record that it held up within twenty-four hours. After Edinburgh bowled Rotterdam out for 93, we wrote that their remaining fixtures were Glasgow, Dublin and Amsterdam — the three sides below fourth — and that "barring something strange, they finish first". The first of those three is done, by seven wickets, with an over to spare.

The thing we have not called well is Glasgow. We have now watched them post 159, 176 and a competitive total in three of their five defeats, and we have kept describing the losses as bowling failures. Sunday says the problem is narrower and more fixable than that: four batters got in, none of them got out of the twenties or thirties, and there was no innings of forty-plus in the card. Glasgow's issue is conversion, not collapse.

Edinburgh Castle Rockers have eleven points from six, are unbeaten, and their net run rate of 2.566 makes the top place effectively theirs to lose. They have Dublin Guardians, Amsterdam Flames and Rotterdam Dockers to come — Dublin are winless, and they have already beaten the other two. What is quietly remarkable is the spread: Delany won them a game on Saturday with 31 from 18, McMullen won this one with 82 not out, Curran and Boult and Santner and Watt have all had match-defining spells. Five wins, five different architects.

Glasgow Cosmic are fifth on two points from six, with one win and five straight defeats, and a net run rate of -1.076 that puts qualification beyond arithmetic rather than beyond hope. Rotterdam, Dublin and Belfast remain. Their most encouraging number on Sunday was Liam Livingstone's 4-0-25-0 — the most economical spell of the innings, from a batter who bowls — and their most instructive was the 46 that came off Reuben Wilson's four overs.

Richie Berrington's 38 from 20 deserves the last word from the losing side. He came in at 72 for 3 against Boult, Curran, Watt and Santner, and he hit three sixes. On a day when four team-mates got in and got out, the captain of Scotland played the only innings in Glasgow's card that had no hesitation in it.