If we have learned anything about the Hundred as we near the end of its fifth season it is that people will see in it whatever they wish to. So Adam Zampa’s last-minute arrival in the Oval Invincibles squad from Australia, confirmed on Thursday, will be perceived by some as the welcome return of a global white-ball star, the leading wicket-taker in last season’s competition. Others will consider the very possibility of a team making a big, potentially decisive signing for just the final of a competition proof of its essential unseriousness. Another group might care about nothing but their own entertainment. Protest will be fuelled by the fact that the success of the Invincibles, who go into Sunday’s decider seeking a three-peat, and Oval-based teams in general, is perhaps starting to grate.
They are something of an anomaly. The Hundred is structurally designed to promote inconsistency across seasons, unpredictability generally being seen as a positive trait in sporting competition and particularly important in a tournament with only eight teams and no relegation, circumstances that might allow it to become very stale very quickly. So Trent Rockets men, runners-up in this year’s table, have now finished first, second, third and fifth twice; while the team they face in Saturday’s eliminator, third-placed Northern Superchargers, have never finished in the same position twice.
But the Invincibles have chosen stability, building their team around a core of players who have been there from the start (the new player-recruitment system expected to be introduced for next season aims to encourage more player movement, albeit around a small number of players on longer-term contracts). Familiarity is not the only ingredient of success but it is notable that the two worst teams in this season’s men’s competition, London Spirit and Welsh Fire, each have only one player who has made more than 25 appearances for them, while the Invincibles have six. Nine of the XI that started last year’s final have returned this year, while Sam Billings has captained them through 41 of their 42 games.
Like the Invincibles, Southern Brave women have topped their table for the third time in five years – they have only once finished outside the top two, and that was last year when they came last – but so far they have only once converted their league success into a title. Last year they won one game and that with one ball to spare; Thursday’s victory over Welsh Fire, who collapsed from 50 for one to finish with 77 for nine, completed the first 100% record of any team, men or women, in the history of the tournament (unless you count Welsh Fire men’s eight defeats from eight in 2022). The England seamer Lauren Bell added another four wickets to an outstanding record for the Brave: she has the most wickets this season at the lowest average, and one of the few to come close to her combination of wickets (lots) and runs conceded (few) is her teammate Tilly Corteen-Coleman.
Superchargers will be involved in both eliminators, with London Spirit their opponents in the women’s competition. The sides met less than a fortnight ago, when Superchargers romped to victory by eight wickets (they have become fearsome chasers, winning three of their last five games by eight wickets and one by seven, with a combined total of precisely 100 balls to spare), and for all that it’s their home ground Spirit have not won at Lord’s since they pipped the Invincibles in the first game of the season.
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Coached by Andrew Flintoff, captained by Harry Brook and with Ben Stokes involved as a non-playing mentor, their men’s team has been, well, supercharged by the unlikely figure of Zak Crawley, whose 280 runs this season already exceeds the number he scored in 2021, 2022 and 2023 combined (he did not play in 2024 because of injury). In 2023 he averaged 13 in five innings and overall had been so hopeless that Spirit cut him from their squad in February. The success of Crawley, like the Superchargers’ women, offers a romantic vision of a tournament that allows one season’s losers to become winners the next – a vision that may or may not survive contact with the remorseless juggernaut that is the Invincibles.
