Cricket
Nat Sciver-Brunt’s New Era of Triumph

Nat Sciver-Brunt view Brunt’s success has changed a bit over the years.
Last year, she took time off from the game to take care of her mental health and well-being. If she’s learned anything, it’s a willingness to put herself first.
In fact, she learned a lot during that time, such as how to come up with a plan to never get to the “boiling point” again. But as she prepares to lead England into the T20 World Cup as Heather Knight’s replacement and the country’s most important player in the last difficult year, she knows she must take care of herself.
Sciver-Brunt made a great comeback after being out for three months. On the combined ODI and T20I tour of the West Indies, she scored the most runs for England and was named player of the series in the 50-over format. After that tour, Sciver-Brunt spoke to Knight and decided she was ready to resume her vice-captain duties, which she had put on hold earlier in her career. Having scored 50 in England’s win over South Africa in an official pre-World Cup warm-up match (she didn’t play as either a batswoman or bowler in Wednesday’s five-wicket win over New Zealand), all is going well so far.
Sciver-Brunt told ESPNcricinfo after the second warm-up match at Western Province Cricket Club in Cape Town: “Taking myself out is something I’ve never had to do in my career.” “I’ve always tried to give everything for the team and help us win, so I’m taking the time now to think about whether I can handle it or not. I really wanted to know if it would affect my performance, and I was glad to be in a situation where it didn’t.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen. Before the tour, I wasn’t going to set myself a target of scoring or taking wickets in every game. It was more about how I felt on the field and what I could do to help, not about how good I was or how many wickets I scored or anything like that. It was more about being a part of the team and having fun. So success had a different face.
“Now success looks different. You want to win and be good for your team and other things, but for me it was more important that I was doing well.”
Sciver-Brunt says her desire to always help the team made it difficult for her to take time for herself. But after the Covid 19 pandemic and subsequent travels (an away campaign with the Ashes, an ODI World Cup (where she was instrumental in England’s second-place finish) and the Commonwealth Games at home), she felt she had no choice but to quit. But when she spoke to the England Women’s team doctor, she felt better.
“It was a strange place to be,” she reflected back. “I had never felt like that in my life. Most of the time I don’t want to miss anything because I don’t want to disappoint anyone. I don’t want to be inaccessible to anyone. Realizing that letting myself go or pulling myself out was the hardest thing to do because I’ve never been at that point or felt that way before.
“When I went home, I knew it was the right thing to do. I might have come home thinking, “I’m fine, I should go back,” but when I took a step back and went home, I knew it was the right thing to do. It was weird to let myself go, because that hadn’t happened a lot on our team, and I don’t like to miss out. I want to do everything we need to do to win, so I don’t usually think, “This isn’t right, I need to take a step back.”
Her wife and teammate Katherine Sciver-Brunt also knew something was wrong.
“Because I’ve a pretty even-keeled personality, even Katherine can tell when something is wrong with me,” Sciver-Brunt says. “So she kind of knew I wasn’t doing well. It was good to have this person there who knew me almost better than I knew myself. It was like having someone in your corner.

The couple has just started using their married name on the pitch and will wear shirts showing it for the first time in South Africa.
“Everyone already knows we’re married, so it’s not like we’re saying, ‘Oh, hello, it’s obvious now,'” Sciver-Brunt says. “But it’s a nice way for both of us to be represented on the field” “And yeah, a little Brunt in my bowling is definitely a good thing!”
Katherine, who turns 38 in July, was spared during India’s tour of England last summer and was also not in the ODI team in the Caribbean, but she returned for the T20I portion of the tour and is now ready for what could be her final World Cup.
Katherine was part of the England team that won the T20 title in 2009 and finished runner-up to Australia in 2012. Sciver-Brunt, on the other hand, has played in two finals that Australia won and England lost, in 2014 and 2018. Sciver-Brunt also managed a valiant 148 runs without an out when England lost the ODI World Cup final to Australia last year. One thing that has been on England’s mind ahead of this tournament is that their semi-final in the last T20 World Cup in Australia was cancelled due to rain. Instead, India moved on as group winners and lost the final to the hosts.
The couple has just started using their married name on the pitch and will wear shirts showing it for the first time in South Africa.
“Everyone already knows we’re married, so it’s not like we’re saying, ‘Oh, hello, it’s obvious now,'” Sciver-Brunt says. “But it’s a nice way for both of us to be represented on the field” “And yeah, a little Brunt in my bowling is definitely a good thing!”
Katherine, who turns 38 in July, was spared during India’s tour of England last summer and was also not in the ODI team in the Caribbean, but she returned for the T20I portion of the tour and is now ready for what could be her final World Cup.
Katherine was part of the England team that won the T20 title in 2009 and finished runner-up to Australia in 2012. Sciver-Brunt, on the other hand, has played in two finals that Australia won and England lost, in 2014 and 2018. Sciver-Brunt also managed a valiant 148 runs without an out when England lost the ODI World Cup final to Australia last year. One thing that has been on England’s mind ahead of this tournament is that their semi-final in the last T20 World Cup in Australia was cancelled due to rain. Instead, India moved on as group winners and lost the final to the hosts.
So when Sciver-Brunt says, through clenched teeth and raised eyebrows, “I don’t want to come in second anymore,” it doesn’t sound like a sentence an athlete says the day before a tournament. It looks and sounds like a promise. “I’d really like to get to the finals,” she says again.
“Especially at T20, we always seem to do well until the end when it rains or we don’t play as well as we usually do,” she says. “A lot of us who have played in these tournaments say, ‘Right, I don’t want to do this anymore.’ But we have to try!’
“As a team, we’re in a really good position, and I think that the way we want to play, as long as we can do it on the field and against the best teams, puts us in a really good position to get to the knockout rounds. In tournaments, we’re told not to think too far ahead and focus on the next game as much as possible, and I think we’ll. I think once the tournament starts, it’ll go by so fast that all you can think about is the next game. But I’d really like to be in the final now
Cricket
De Zorzi now has a chance to become the star he has always wanted to be.

Tony de Zorzi returned to the Wanderers eight years after he was captain of King Edwards VII, one of Johannesburg’s best schools, and seven years after he led South Africa’s Under-19 team to a World Cup where they were the defending champions but finished in 11th place. He found friends he didn’t know he had.
There were a few of my friends here, and it’s always nice to have my mum watching,” de Zorzi said. “Some people said they were my friends, but I’ve never met them.”
Natasha raised de Zorzi on her own, and he has always wanted to be the best he could be for her. She doesn’t watch him play much anymore because he took the long way to become an international cricket player. He went to the same school as Neil McKenzie and Graeme Smith, then to Pretoria, and finally to Cape Town, which is 1400 kilometres away from where he grew up. In a way, it was good for de Zorzi to play his first Test match on the Highveld and get his first fifty while Natasha was watching.
He said, “She always sits in the same spot, so I knew where she was.” “Since I’m in Cape Town, she hasn’t been able to watch many games. I hope I can get three figures the next time she comes.”
De Zorzi has set high goals for himself. In the last two years, only one of his teammates has scored a hundred at home, and only two others (Sarel Erwee and Kyle Verreynne, neither of whom is playing in this series) have reached 100. But because he has let people down in the past, he knows this is his chance to step up.
“My life has changed a lot since I played for SA under-19,” de Zorzi said. “I was captain, but I wasn’t the star of that side,” he said.
Because Wiaan Mulder did it. When De Zorzi came back from the World Cup for his age group, he had to go back to club cricket and “start over.” He played for the University of Pretoria team, which was led by Kruger van Wyk, who is now the fielding coach. Then he got a job with Northerns, where he kept getting better and better and averaged almost 80 for the second-tier provincial team in the summer of 2016–17. In the summer of 2020, he moved to Western Province, where Ashwell Prince was the head coach. Since then, he has been made captain.
This summer, he is averaging over 100, mostly because of his unbeaten 304 against the Knights, when Gerald Coetzee was part of his attack (though admittedly not many other big names).
“It’s been a long process, and I’m glad it’s come to this,” said de Zorzi. “It also reminds me of where I came from and to not get too far ahead of myself because I had to do a lot of dirty work to get there. Some guys start getting it a little bit earlier. Mine is starting to come true right now.”
After averaging over 48 in three of the last four seasons, de Zorzi was hard to ignore in this Test squad, but it took a change in leadership for that to happen. He got his chance because the new red-ball coach, Shukri Conrad, also acts as a selector when there isn’t a panel. “We knew it would be a new start when the coaches changed,” de Zorzi said. “If everyone took a chance and did well, you knew there would be a new set of eyes and maybe even more chances. That was a lot of fun. Dean Elgar, who was captain at the time, used to say that the number of runs you scored would get you into the team. Guys knew that they had to have a good season if they wanted to move up. There was nothing else to do.”

But now that it has, players like de Zorzi need to take control of their space. He showed West Indies’ attack what he was made of in the first Test, and Kyle Mayers saw it. “This guy seems to have everything together,” he said. “He is square of the wicket and strong.”
De Zorzi is very good at the cut shot. In this innings, he got almost a third of his runs with the cut shot. However, the West Indies had already figured him out from the first Test. At the SuperSport Park, they tried to give him less space. De Zorzi said, “They stick to the basics a little bit longer.” “You might get a few less bad balls, but international cricketers who do their homework are going to do it. I could tell they had different plans based on how they bowled to me today compared to how they did it at SuperSport Park. They can make it harder for you to score. And, of course, the intensity is a little bit higher. When I got out, I was really tired. It is not easy.”
But so was de Zorzi. During the free-flowing afternoon session in South Africa, he played well. Natasha sat still in the Memorial Stand the whole time. De Zorzi made his first sign to her when he hit Alzarri Joseph out of the ground with the 82nd ball he faced. She would have been incredibly proud, no doubt. As the pitch got faster and West Indies made a comeback, De Zorzi faced 73 more balls and scored 35 more runs.
They lost five wickets for 64 runs after tea, so the game is now tied. If South Africa can’t score more than 350, West Indies might be able to fight back. If you give up on that, on a pitch that is already starting to turn, the game might be over. Either way, it’s set up to bring in people who didn’t know they liked cricket, especially during a mid-week Test match when only a small part of the stadium is filled. But it’s important. And de Zorzi knows that better than anyone else.
Cricket
The collapse that never came at Hagley Oval involving Sri Lanka

The skies are gray and heavy, like a wet blanket that will soon be thrown over the whole series. The field is so full of plants that animals that live in the woods have moved in. The outfield is wet, and sometimes a cold drizzle falls on biting winds. And while the local bowlers, who are all big and tall, are nimble and strong in their warm-up overs on the practice pitches, the Sri Lankan batters, who are covered in wool sweaters, face throwdowns and look like they are about to be sacrificed on an altar of seam bowling.
Get the coin. Put Sri Lanka in. Watch the ball jump gleefully off the edges of the bats and into the hands of the slip cordon as batter after batter falls like marionettes, the scoreboard showing 45-3, then 67-5, and a few swipes at the end pushing the total just over 100. Here are the usual parts of Sri Lanka’s day one story on a ground like Hagley Oval.
When they were here before, they didn’t have to bat first, but they were still out after 138 runs. The last time, they had players like Kumar Sangakkara on their team, but they still lost by 104 runs. Unless Sri Lanka pulls off a near-miracle in the second innings, which they do from time to time, these are game-changing messes. (Then New Zealand will go up to bat and put on half a million for six while smiling politely, which will only show how bad they were before.)
Then this happened. Four years after the last time they played a Test in New Zealand, where they were beaten by 423 runs at this same site, they had an amazing day of batting. Of defensive play that was mostly okay and technique that was pretty good. Had Sri Lanka’s batters done the work to figure out where their off stump was before they started a Test on foreign soil? Any Sri Lanka fan should feel a tear of pure pride just thinking about it.
Kusal Mendis, who may have been the best player in the XI, took the lead. The most important part of his 87 out of 83 was how he judged length on a surface that was a bit bumpy. When it was on a good length, he defended close to his body, almost always with soft hands, so that when the ball came in and took the edge, it bounced short of the slips. Most of the time, though, he defended inside the line, mostly using his bat to block balls that could hit him in front of the wickets or get past him to the wickets.
When New Zealand’s bowlers bowled fuller and tried hard to get an edge that could be caught, Mendis gave his all to his front-foot strokes, sometimes driving it with authority, other times sending it squirting off the face of the bat through backward point, and other times flicking it deliciously off his pads.

He got 50 runs off of 40 balls, but New Zealand’s bowlers didn’t have a great morning. 44 of those runs came from fours. He and Dimuth Karunaratne, who was just as steady but less aggressive against balls that could be hit, put together a 137-run partnership at the second wicket that was the key to Sri Lanka’s progress on day one. They would get out in consecutive overs, but when they did, they were often replaced by better batsmen.
Angelo Mathews waited for the shorter balls and scored 38 of his 47 runs through the leg side. He also hit a couple of fours off his pads when the ball was close to him. Dinesh Chandimal liked to hit the ball to the off side, and he did so six times. As Dhananjaya de Silva batted with Kasun Rajitha near the end of the day, he made boundaries whenever he could.
Their scoring areas were different, but almost all of Sri Lanka’s top seven batters covered the stumps, didn’t rush at balls until they were set, didn’t mind when deliveries beat their bats, and didn’t chase seaming balls outside their stumps. Even when bowled at (mostly by Tim Southee and Matt Henry), they didn’t give up, which is something they often do when the ball is turning.
Given Sri Lanka’s long tail and lack of experience in the field, which New Zealand can easily take advantage of, 305 for 6 is not a great first-day score. It is possible that New Zealand will win the match. But given the situation, Sri Lanka were good enough. And it’s not often that you can say that about Sri Lanka on the first day of a match in New Zealand.
Cricket
India’s trust is rewarded by Bharat’s skill behind the stumps.

Sometimes almost everything that makes up a Test match is found in a single ball. One of those balls was the one that knocked Pat Cummins out of the game on the third morning in Delhi. It had the blunt precision of the Indian spinners, the deadly glide that made this pitch so hard to play on, and the sweep, a high-risk, high-reward shot so controversial that a thousand autopsies were written about it.
And there was one more thing. After the ball slipped under Cummins‘ bat, it hit the inside edge of the outside stump, bounced off the side of the middle stump and landed in KS Bharat’s gloves.
The ball didn’t spin sharply, but it didn’t go all the way with the arm either. After it was thrown, it straightened just a little. It also stayed low before bouncing off the stumps twice. Bharat had followed the ball all the way, even as Cummins took a wild swing, and he had collected it cleanly.
It didn’t matter because the ball was dead by the time he reached it, but he did a good job with his glove.
Later that day, when India had lost four wickets and were 27 runs away from their target, Bharat was moved up the order and scored a brilliant unbeaten 23 off 22 balls, including three perfectly timed fours to cover and a solid knock with a slog-swept six.
In his first two Test innings, Bharat had scored 8 and 6 in the first two games of this series. He must have felt much better after that start because he played on Sunday. Some watching from the outside might have even thought he was trying to save his career with that performance.
But India probably wouldn’t have seriously considered taking Bharat out of the game after Delhi, even if he had done nothing in the second innings. They probably know that anyone can score a number of low scores on difficult pitches, and they may have seen glimpses of Bharat’s counter-attacking potential during his brief stint with the Indian national team

It took a long time for these things to happen.
In May 2018, Indian senior team officials selected Bharat as the goalkeeper for the four-day tour and Rishabh Pant as the goalkeeper for the 50-over tour. The Indian senior team was also touring England that summer, so the A tour was a shadow tour. At the time, officials felt that Bharat was India’s best pure goalkeeper and Pant was an exciting batsman whose glovework needed work.
When Wriddhiman Saha got injured and could not join the England tour, India included Pant in its Test team in place of Bharat. The genius is going in his own direction.
But Bharat remained an important player in India’s second team. Since the beginning of 2018, he has played 19 first-class matches for the India A team, which is more than any other player except Abhimanyu Easwaran, who bats first. In those India A matches, he has scored 971 runs at a rate of 48.55, including three hundreds.
Last year, when India took Saha out of its test team, Bharat took his place. So it made sense that Bharat made his debut when Pant was injured. The Indian team management may have been tempted by Ishan Kishan’s competing claims, but they chose Bharat at the start of this Border-Gavaskar series.
At the start of the 2019-20 home season, India dropped Pant from the Test programme XI and brought back Saha for a series against South Africa. Virat Kohli described Saha as the best goalkeeper in the world and they felt his good glove work was important on India’s winding tracks. They felt that Pant still needed to work on his goalkeeping. Pant worked on it and became a world-class goalkeeper when India played England in early 2021. Until then, however, Saha was still the first choice for home games.
At the start of this series between India and Australia, the same idea was in play. India appreciates how good Bharat is with the bat, but they know he is their best goalkeeper when Pant is not around.