Sixers Beat Renegades by 11 Runs to Stay Unbeaten: Kerr's 53, Gardner's 3 for 13 and Five Wickets for 6 at the End

Good sides win the games they should lose. With two balls of the 19th over left, the Renegades needed 18 off 7 with five wickets in hand and Tess Flintoff hitting cleanly. Then Sarah Coyte bowled Flintoff, and in the last over Ashleigh Gardner took three wickets and the Renegades lost a fifth to a run-out. Five wickets fell for 6 runs in seven balls, and a 140 that had looked thin was enough by 11.

That is five wins from five for the Sydney Sixers. The Renegades, who had won their last two, will feel this one got away from them twice: once at the start of the chase, and once at the very end.

The Sixers' innings never quite got going. Perry survived two reviews in the first four overs, and the Sixers were 58 for 1 at the halfway mark, with Perry on 15. Kerr changed the pace. She came in at 68 for 2 and hit seven fours on the way to fifty off 30 balls, and her stand of 56 with Perry took the Sixers to 124 for 2 in the 18th over. Then Perry was run out for 30, and only 16 more runs came from the last 14 balls as three more wickets fell, Erin Burns also run out.

The bowling made up for it at once. Lauren Cheatle had Hayley Matthews caught by Kerr in the second over, Kerr had Courtney Webb caught by Cheatle, and Kerr ran out Olivia Porter. The Renegades were 22 for 3 after 4.3 overs. Cheatle came back to remove Nicole Faltum, and Caoimhe Bray had Sophie Molineux caught. And when the game tightened again late on, Coyte and Gardner closed it out. Gardner's three wickets came in the last over and cost 13 runs across her three overs.

At 63 for 5 in the 12th over, the Renegades were in trouble, and Matthews, their leading run-scorer at the top, had gone for 1. Tess Flintoff and Georgia Wareham put on 60 for the sixth wicket, Flintoff hitting five fours and a six, and with 18 needed from seven balls the chase was very much alive. Coyte's ball to bowl Flintoff for 44 was the turning point, and after it the lower order lost its head: Wareham was bowled by Gardner, Chloe Tryon and Deandra Dottin were caught, and Tayla Vlaeminck was run out off the final ball.

The bowling was good enough to win. Milly Illingworth took 2 for 24, Wareham went for only 21 in four overs, and three of the six Sixers wickets were run-outs or stumpings. It was the start of the chase that cost them, and then a finish that needed one calm head. On another night, Flintoff's innings wins this game.

This was the second game of the day at Junction Oval, after 331 runs had been scored in the afternoon, and it played very differently. Both sides found it hard to score early on: the Sixers made 50 off their first 48 balls, the Renegades 50 off 53. The spinners were the hardest to score off, Gardner going for 13 in three overs and Wareham for 21 in four. A total of 140 looked below par at the break. It turned out to be enough.

Kerr did a bit of everything. Her 53 off 34 was the only innings of real pace in the Sixers' 140; without it they would have been nearer 120. Then in the field she caught Matthews in the second over, caught Tryon in the last, took 1 for 29 with her leg-spin, and ran out Porter in the fifth over to make it 22 for 3. On a night when the margin was 11 runs, almost every part of her game counted.

We leaned to the Sixers, with some confidence, and they won, but it was much closer than we expected. We named Perry against Vlaeminck as the match-up to watch and said if Perry was still in after ten overs the Sixers would probably make 160 or more. She was, on 15, and they made 140. We said Matthews was the key to the Renegades' innings; she made 1, and that mattered. We did flag that the second game on this pitch might help the spinners like Gardner and Kerr, and they had a big say in the result.

The Sixers are second on 10 points, level with the unbeaten Scorchers, who are ahead on net run rate. The Renegades stay on four points from five games. These two meet again straight away, on November 15 at North Sydney Oval, and after tonight the Renegades will feel they owe the Sixers one.