Sunrisers Leeds vs Manchester Super Giants Review — 182 Chased at Headingley, and Brook Made the Last Bit Look Rude

There is a moment in a chase like this where you can see a crowd change its mind. Manchester Super Giants had made 181, Jos Buttler had walked off unbeaten on 63 from 33 balls looking like a man who had solved the evening, and Headingley had settled into the particular resigned hum of a ground that has come to watch its team lose a good game. And then Mitch Marsh started hitting the ball, and about eight minutes later the hum had become something else entirely.

Sunrisers Leeds won by eight wickets with twelve balls to spare. One hundred and eighty-two is the highest total successfully chased at Headingley and the third-highest chase in the history of The Hundred, and the remarkable thing about it — the thing that will annoy Manchester Super Giants most when they watch it back — is that at no stage did it look difficult.

Take Manchester Super Giants' innings first, because it was very good and it still was not enough. Tim Seifert's 28 from 16 at the top set a tempo, Aiden Markram's 32 from 23 held it, and then Buttler and Klaasen put on 105 together — a partnership between two of the four or five cleanest strikers in the world, both of whom happened to be in form on the same night. Buttler was the anchor, which is a sentence that would have made no sense five years ago; Klaasen was the violence, 53 from 27, taking on the straight boundary because that is what Klaasen does.

One hundred and eighty-one, on a ground where the average first-innings score this tournament has been comfortably under 160. Every model on the planet had Manchester Super Giants as heavy favourites at the interval. That includes ours.

Then Mitch Marsh played the innings that decided it. Sixty-three from twenty-six balls is a strike rate of well over 240, and it came in the phase of the chase where the required rate is theoretically manageable and psychologically enormous — you need nine an over from ball one, which sounds fine until you have to actually go and get it. Marsh removed the arithmetic. By the time he was out, Sunrisers Leeds were not chasing a big total; they were finishing a small one.

Zak Crawley's 56 not out from 34 is the innings that will get the least attention and probably deserves the second-most. A captain's job in a chase of this size is to make sure that when the great innings ends — and Marsh's was always going to end — the required rate does not immediately spike back up. Crawley never let it. He batted at a fraction over a run a ball, ran hard, kept the strike moving to whoever was hitting, and made sure that the man at the other end always had a platform to be reckless from.

And Harry Brook, at his home ground, in front of a crowd that has watched him grow up, hit six sixes in seventeen balls. Forty-two not out. There is nothing analytical to say about it — no matchup edge to point to, no bowler-specific plan to identify. It was a very good player in very good touch deciding that the game was going to end early and then ending it early, finishing with a six over midwicket. Some innings are tactics. That one was just talent, on the loose, at home.

Spare a thought for Noor Ahmad, who went for 37 without a wicket. He has been Manchester Super Giants' control bowler all tournament — the man who is supposed to make the middle phase safe. On Tuesday the middle phase was where the match was lost, and there is no shame in it: when a batter is hitting the ball as cleanly as Marsh was, the difference between a good ball and a bad one shrinks to almost nothing.

The earlier game at Headingley was the better contest and, for a certain audience, the better story. Manchester Super Giants Women collapsed to 71 for 5 chasing 142 — four wickets for ten runs, the sort of clatter that usually ends a match — and Smriti Mandhana simply refused to accept that the game had been decided without her. She finished on 88 not out and won it with two straight sixes off the closing deliveries, with five balls remaining.

Darcey Carter will not enjoy the replay of the drop that reprieved Mandhana on 71. It is worth saying clearly, though, that a dropped catch does not explain an innings like that; Mandhana had already made 71 by then against an attack that had taken four for ten. The chance was an opportunity to stop something that was already happening.

CricIntel did not preview this fixture — our Hundred coverage on Tuesday was focused elsewhere — so there is no prediction to grade. For honesty's sake we will note the thing we would have got wrong: we have spent this tournament describing Headingley as a ground where 160 wins, and two sides just scored 363 between them in a hundred balls each. That reading needs updating.

Going forward: Manchester Super Giants' men remain among the strongest sides in this competition on paper and have now lost a game they scored 181 in, which is the kind of defeat that tells you nothing is wrong except the result. Sunrisers Leeds, who came into this evening under pressure, have a chase like this in the bank and a Brook who is clearly in touch — that is a dangerous combination in a tournament this short. On the women's side, Manchester Super Giants stay unbeaten, and any bowling attack that reduces them to 71 for 5 and still loses will spend the next week thinking about Smriti Mandhana.