Did you see… Kate Cross’s deflect-o-run-out of Danni Wyatt?

3 minute read

Southern Brave’s Danni Wyatt played the most significant innings in the Hundred final. It ended the way all good limited overs innings should end – with a slightly chaotic run-out.

Kate Cross isn’t exactly from Manchester. She played her formative cricket in Heywood, just a little way north of what is known as the Greater Manchester Built-Up Area where the vowels start to narrow and people are prone to pronouncing their Rs towards the end of their worrrrds. Technically, it’s Greaterrr Manchesterrr, but in ‘what does it feel like’ terms, it’s Lancashire.

That’s our take, looking up from the south/Cheshire side of the city. We can’t say what Cross herself thinks. We’d guess she’s happy to be associated with both Manchester and Lancashire. After all, she started playing for Lancashire Women’s senior side when she was just 13, and in the first two years of the famously “city-based” Hundred, she was Manchester Originals’ captain.

It’s just different ways of slicing and dicing the same thing really. Either way, she knew which side of the Pennines she was from – the correct one.

But then her and Manchester Originals coach Stephen Parry did a balls-up. They came up with this plan where Cross wouldn’t be one of the four players the team was allowed to retain after the second season of the Hundred, but they’d then buy her first chance they got in the draft using their one ‘Right to Match’ (RTM) card which enabled each team to re-sign another of their 2022 players.

“We were sure that nobody would even think about signing me,” Cross told Cricinfo. “I was Manchester captain and we thought people would assume they would RTM me – which was the plan.”

Except there was another rule that said teams could only sign so many players in the top wage bracket and Manchester already had a full allocation when Northern Superchargers (Leeds) bid for Cross. Manchester were helpless. Their captain had to move.

So there Cross was yesterday, a proud Mancunian and Lancastrian, presumably having now recategorised herself as a proud northerner, playing in the Hundred final for Northern Superchargers. We’re not sure what this says about city-based teams v counties, or drafts, or team identities more generally. Probably just that there’s a certain artifice about all of it and players and fans contrive their allegiances as best they can catch hold of.

> I Don’t Like Cricket, I Hate It – the city-based T20 edition

Unfortunately for Cross, she still didn’t end up on the winning side. She did manage a comedy run-out though, which would have provided some consolation for seeing a chance go down off her bowling the ball before.

What happened was Southern Brave’s Georgia Adams’ duffed a drive into a flinching, recoiling Wyatt, who had set off for what would have definitely been a run but for the location of her own body. We suppose body location is quite a key element of all runs and run-outs now that we think about it – but not usually in this particular way.

Unfortunately for Wyatt, the ball ricocheted off her in a generous and beautifully inviting parabola as she continued spinning in panic. This left Cross to execute not-the-most-difficult run-out in history.

In the end, it didn’t much matter. Northern could only Supercharge their way to 105 all out in pursuit of Southern’s Brave 139-6.

This final did at least mean that Oval Invincibles didn’t win again, after taking the first two editions of the competition. They won the men’s final though, so their ludicrously hubristic name hasn’t yet become the joke it is always destined to be.

If there’s one thing we can all agree on in all forms of domestic cricket – cities, counties, regions or petty kingdoms – it’s that no-one wants the Surrey/Oval team to win.

> We have one big question about The Hundred TV graphics

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