GCF World Twenty20 Championship XIII: Everything Thread

[The Grearish Union]

Quarterfinal Cutoff!

Quarter Final 1 @ Southgate Park, Plibury, Grearia (42,000)
Darmen 173/5 (19.5 overs)
Hebitaka 170/6 (20 overs)
Darmen win by 5 wickets


Quarter Final 2 @ Auburn Hill, Edgenorth, Grearia (30,000)
Mattijana 160/5 (20 overs)
The Plough Islands 192/4 (20 overs)
The Plough Islands win by 32 runs

[Liventia]

Unknown force propelling Liventia's cricketers forward, experts say it's just skill
GRUENBERG— Liventia, the world number two Twenty20 side, have reached the quarter-finals of the 13th World Championship being held in Gruenberg and Grearia from a field of 28.

Despite a lack of news reports coming out of Liventia about the team's efforts, the team quietly went about their business in the group stage, winning their opening five games before losing a close dead rubber against Elejamie in the final over.

This has led to some doubts about what mysterious force could be producing such a good run of form, given the unknown but mythical quality that news reports from participating nations often seem to bring to teams' performances in major tournaments.

Aside from an early piece of reporting detailing the team selection for the tournament, little else has been heard from traditionally cricket-mad Liventia, in part due to the current craze of following with intense detail every last thousandth of a second in the ongoing World Grand Prix Championship season.

Experts consulted on the odd phenomenon pointed out that as the world number two team, perhaps it's simply a high level of skill that has seen Ollie Kerr's men reach the last eight, where they will play Damukuni.

[Gruenberg]

Cutoff for the QFs.

Ko-oren 205/4 (20 overs)
Ethane 125 (18.3 overs)

Liventia 105/9 (11.4 overs)
Damukuni 104/4 (20 overs)

The semi-final will be Liventia v Ko-oren at the Moroschwegen Arena of Death.

[Ko-oren]

Back to the Semis

The Greenblues move on again, and run into probably the most notable cricket nation, Liventia. All remaining teams have some sort of history against us - in fact, the other three teams are always locked into our Test schedule. Liventia, Darmen, and the Plough Islands. Against the latter two, we even have a trophy to include some extra ODI (and sometimes T20) matches. Whatever happens, and regardless of whether we make the final or the third place playoff, we will get two exciting fixtures against two out of our three biggest cricket rivals.

Darmen and the Plough Islands will decide on a finalist, after beating Hebitaka and Mattijana, respectively. Hebitaka didn't go down until the penultimate ball, and Mattijana stared at an insurmountable target early on in their innings. Meanwhile, the Liventians made short work of their target, surpassing Damukuni's 104 within twelve overs, giving up nine wickets in the process. Exciting? Very. Fun? Not per se. The Greenblues had an 'easy' route to the final four, posting a target of 206 and then getting Ethane all out for 125, winning by 80 runs.

Our result versus Ethane should give us a lot of hope: we can post high targets. It's not all bowling by our team (though getting the red team all out is a magnificent result across both innings). We haven't posted a target like this since our matchday one win over Lisander, scoring 188. On yesterday's form, this team can beat anyone, and that includes the second-ranked Liventians. Just getting the opportunity to play them doesn't come around very often, let alone be evenly matched against them. Let's face it: our Test team can definitely hold a candle to them, but rarely gets the win across a series. T20 is a far more level playing field... and we've won this tournament before. We can do it again.

As the tournament runs towards its end, and everyone gets a little more nervous, the bigger names get more and more starts. As for the next match, Twaddle is expected to start over the limited overs specialist Stevenson, with Penn as partner. Following that, Welsh and Doyle should be the biggest run scorers. From the trio of Windsor, Letchford, and Commins, it's Commins who's earned his teammates' trust and will bat at fifth. You can hardly expect a 22-year old to be the one to stop a potential slide, so it's Wheelwright and Pandherinthen to bat next, both with the ability to get on strike and score some late-match runs. They aren't exactly players you expect big scores and boundaries from, but should the top five wickets fall quickly, they can prevent us from falling too far short in a chase. Back to the better known options, it's yMharwn to bat at eighth. The bowlers will be (in batting order) yLlelmedd, Kinghead, and Harvey.

Looking ahead to the domestic season, the twelve T20 teams are healthy as ever. The more excentric owners of other sports clubs (the most excentric owners mostly being baseball owners, but still) preside the franchises. From the Aubury Maroons sharing an owner with football club Maynard AFC (from short lived Ounaian league fame), to the Greencaster Bears falling in line with a cohort of businessmen owning close to a dozen clubs across the Greencaster metro area, and of course the Penstead Pirates owned by about everyone on Penstead's island, selling shares as the only way to keep the team in town. The lower leagues (one league for each of the six cricket regions) will probably keep getting crowds in the low thousands for a handful of T20 matches, if previous years are anything to go by. Eastern Surbourneshire's derby between Bruncester and Cirelbourne, or Greencaster's various city derbies (most notably Sydberg versus South Sydberg, and Thornwich versus Guildwood as the city centre's clubs). Leeshire's clubs cover the most ground, all the way from west coast Eleanor and Eaglebury to 'northern' Maethoru - support is easily highest in this league, even if it doesn't produce the most talent. That distinction goes to Western Surbourneshire (mark Ansonville versus Burnet in your calendars) and Mawryshire (Lawchwmaen versus Mawrystwyth, the capital city derby, and Llandy versus Mawrystwyth, the urban derby (or 'urby')). The last remaining region, Willowbourne, has the lowest fan support even if all clubs are located in and around a single city, with low numbers just because some of these teams are in Cote Austral - not exactly cricket heartland. Still, they have several city derbies including Penshaw versus Tohrenna and Cresthill versus Harmstead... and outside of the city limits, there's still Norille versus Anarcourt that draws a crowd.

[Darmen]

END OF OVER 19 6 runs
Winston van der Zee 37 (38)
Adalfuns Armbruster 5 (3)

DAR: 154/5 • CRR: 8.11 • RRR: 17.00 • Need 17 runs from 6 deliveries
Bhavesh Gopikrishan 4-0-36-1
Tatsuki Kimano 4-0-30-2

Shin Tenzuo will have the ball for the final over. Hebitaka can smell victory. van der Zee is anxious to get back on strike.

19.1 1 Short delivery. Armbruster punches one through extra cover. They could have run for two, but getting van der Zee on strike was the priority.

19.2 • Yorker! Tenzuo ties van der Zee up in knots. Very nearly out lbw. At least one player on the Hebitaka side sent up a yell. Darmen needs 16 runs from 4 deliveries.

19.3 6 Full length, but van der Zee returns to sender... and then some. Six! van der Zee, who has so far been quiet, roars to life! 10 needed with 3 deliveries left.

19.4 6 Slower delivery smashed by van der Zee... quite possibly all the way to South Covello. Hebitaka looking nervous now. Tenzuo must find a way to stop van der Zee.

19.5 6 Bouncer, but not high enough, as van der Zee hooks it and sends it flying over backwards square. It clears the boundary by centimeters! Would have meant victory for Darmen either way. Tenzuo hangs his head as van der Zee and Armbruster embrace and celebrate.

Darmen's quarterfinal victory sees them into the semifinals and a matchup with the winner of the Mattijana vs. Plough Islands match currently underway in Edgenorth. van der Zee is declared Player of the Match for his final over heroics.

Darmen 173/5 (19.5)-170/6 (20) Hebitaka
Hebitaka won the toss and chose to bat, Darmen won by 5 wickets
@ Southgate Park, Plibury, Grearia (attendance 42,000)

First Innings
Name                                Runs Balls 4's 6's SR
K Nath    c Acker b Wakefield        21  14     4  0   150.00
N Kim     b Dickenson                10   9     1  0   111.11
D Joshi   c Armbruster† b McAlister  36  27     5  1   133.33
D Aron    not out                    53  45     7  2   117.78
M Asif*   lbw b Myers                 7   4     1  0   175.00
K Musako  b Wakefield                 3   3     0  0   100.00
T Mondal† c Milligan b McAlister     21  13     4  0   161.54
S Tenzuo  not out                     8   5     2  0   160.00
Extras                               11
Total                               170        24  3
Did not bat: R Hibiki, B Gopikrishan, T Kimano

Name        Overs M Runs Wkts Econ.
M Wakefield 4.0   0 34   2     8.50
C McAlister 4.0   0 29   2     7.25
A Dickenson 3.0   0 25   1     8.33
D Gardenar  2.0   0 24   0    12.00
B Bachmann  3.0   0 27   0     9.00
D Myers     4.0   0 31   1     7.75

Second Innings
Name                            Runs Balls 4's 6's SR
V Acker       lbw b Gopikrishan  20  15     3  0   133.33
S Winter*     c Kim b Tenzuo     31  16     5  1   193.75
W van der Zee not out            55  42     6  3   130.95
T Milligan    c Joshi b Hibiki   27  26     4  1   103.85
D Gardenar    c Asif b Kimano    10   7     2  0   142.86
B Bachmann    lbw b Kimano       16   9     3  0   177.78
A Armbruster† not out             6   4     1  0   150.00
Extras                            8
Total                           173        24  5
Did not bat: C McAlister, A Dickenson, D Myers, M Wakefield

Name          Overs M Runs Wkts Econ.
R Hibiki      4.0   0 39   1    9.75
B Gopikrishan 4.0   0 36   1    9.00
T Kimano      4.0   0 30   2    7.50
S Tenzuo      2.5   0 26   1    9.18
M Asif        2.0   0 19   0    9.50
D Aron        3.0   0 23   0    7.67

Player of the Match: Winston van der Zee (DAR) 55-42 not out, 6x4's, 3x6's

[The Plough Islands]

PLOUGH ISLANDS CRICKET ASSOCIATION
XI FOR 20 OVER GAME VS.     DARMEN

        PLAYER           BAT   BOW
#10 JC  Morris           RHB   RLB
#6  A   Halasz           RHB   RLB
#13 ADM Tyrie            RHB   RLB
#11 LM  Scott            LHB   SLA
#8  CAV McCulloch        RHB   ROB
#1  P   Hodgeson (c)     LHB   SLC
#2  DV  Andreyev         RHB   RFM
#12 LE  Tarasov (w)      RHB      
#14 RG  Vowles           LHB   SLA
#16 RA  Williams         LHB   LFM
#5  TSF Gibbs            RHB   RLB

[The Grearish Union]

Grearish Semi Final Cutoff!

Semi Final 1 @ Adam Garden, Forsho (60,000)
Darmen 183/5 (20 overs)
The Plough Islands 185/6 (19.4 overs)
The Plough Islands win by 4 wickets

---

1. The Plough Islands advance to the final at the Atheburn Oval, GU.
2. Darmen will play at the 3rd Place Playoff at The Oval, Gruenberg.

[Gruenberg]

Cutoff for the semifinal.

Liventia 158/6 (20 overs)
Ko-oren 160/7 (19.3 overs)

Congrats to Ko-oren who advance to the final, and bigger congrats to Liventia who get to continue to enjoy Gruenberger hospitality in the 3PPO.

[Ko-oren]

Sometimes a story writes itself. The story of the final is one of them. A group stage rematch is enough of a reason already to warrant special attention, but when you have two teams that have played each other this often? Thats's reason for a national holiday. Everyone in Ko-oren should be watching this one, even if it's your first time watching cricket to begin with.

It's the Dragonflies' second trip to the final, after going there in the eighth edition of the championship, in which we won in Mattijana over Silvacometopia. This time we'll have a much more storied opponent, the Plough Islands.

List of T20Is
Ko-oren 155/5 (20 overs)
The Plough Islands 158/5 (20 overs)

Ko-oren 198/7 (20 overs)
The Plough Islands 189/5 (20 overs)

Ko-oren 155/7 (18.5 overs)
The Plough Islands 153/5 (20 overs)

List of ODIs
The Plough Islands 328/6 (50 overs)
Ko-oren 318/5 (50 overs)

(First Polaris Trophy:)
Ko-oren 169/6 (50 overs)
Plough Islands 171/5 (47.1 overs)

Ko-oren 252/8 (50 overs)
Plough Islands 252/8 (50 overs)

Ko-oren 152/3 (26 overs)
Plough Islands 148 (26.1 overs)

Ko-oren 152 (31.2 overs)
Plough Islands 263 (49.1 overs)

Test Record
10 matches. 4 won by Ko-oren. 3 won by the Plough Islands. 3 draws.

Fans will be drawn towards the T20 results much more than the others. The Dragonflies' Test record over the Foxes is only marginally better and completely relies on the first four tests (three of which ended in a Ko-orenite victory. The record since then is fantastically mediocre). The Plough Islands lead 3-1 in ODIs, having played five such matches. Wait, that's four results! Yes, in between a flurry of low targets characterising the first Polaris Trophy, the one match where both teams' batsmen were capable of scoring a competitive total in the modern game was the one where they both decided to score equally. 252-all.

As said, this is T20, and the previous T20 results are more imporant, maybe. And here Ko-oren has a better record: three played, two won. However, the most recent result went to the Plough Islands, earlier this tournament, as Ko-oren already took a knockout stage berth and pretty much had the group win in the bag as long as the loss wasn't too bad. It wasn't, and the match came down to the final ball. Led by Welsh (69 nice not out nicer) Ko-oren set a target of 156, hindered by Andreyev taking three wickets. Letchford had a nice partnership with Welsh for a while, but beyond that the Young Foxes' bowlers put themselves at more of a disadvantage than that the Ko-orenite batsmen could take advantage. Eleven extras isn't great. Thrall went off in the ensuing innings, taking down Morris on the second ball of the first over, and then plaguing Halasz for a little longer until he fell as well. Extras were a problem for Harvey et al. as well, but perhaps a bigger problem was all the Young Foxes' batsmen having good days. One was gone and the next started an equal, maybe even better, partnership right away. Tyrie scored 21. Andreyev saw through most of the overs near the end of the match, scoring 38, alongside McCulloch scoring 56. The best individual effort was by Welsh, but the Plough Islands had the better batting side that day and rightfully won.

Adding to the upcoming final is how both teams fought their way in. The Dragonflies chased down Liventia's target of 159 with three balls to spare. That's close. But not even the closest chase of the round, with the Foxes overtaking Darmen's 183 runs with two balls to spare.

Our final comments today are by Mitchell Enright, spin bowler for the Dragonflies. "Well, that's a start to a career. It's really not been that long since I played for the youth in big city Greencaster. Definitely didn't expect that I'd be here at this point. What's cool to me is that the Ploughs have a team with only guys my age. Hopefully we'll all still be here in fifteen, twenty years, and then nobody knows how many Tests and other games we'll have played. I'm really grateful that I'm starting in this famous a friendly rivalry and really hopeful that this is going to last for my entire career. We're writing history here, but we also know this isn't the final chapter yet by a long shot."

[The Plough Islands]

20-OVER WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP: YOUNG FOXES FACE OLD FRIENDS IN UNLIKELY FINAL
by Caroline Iddon, Additional Sporting Correspondent, in Atheburn

When a team from the Plough Islands first competed in the World 20-over Championships, they edged out a last-over win against Darmen thanks to a fifty-one year-old bowler and claimed only pride and consolation. Two years later, a team from the Plough Islands led by a nineteen-year-old captain edged out a last-over win against Darmen, and claimed a place in the final of the entire competition.
The Ko-orenites that Peter Hodgeson's team will face on Wednesday are a known quantity in more ways than one; even discounting Dimitri Andreyev's last-ball boundary to win the final match in Group D only last week, the Halcyon Archipelago have fielded several players who are contemporaries of the Young Foxes, and outside the boundary rope there has been no shortage of fraternising and friendship with the younger Ko-orenites. Head coach Catherine Chambers has been keen to stress that the tournament is "no different from a regular tour for us, essentially, and that includes opportunities to learn and to form bonds - particularly with a team, and a nation, that our small country views as a fellow traveller and friend in the context of the multiverse".
The Young Foxes' run to the final has been built on the backs of the younger members of the team; sixteen-year-old Jonathan Morris has been strong opening the batting with Amanda Halasz, and Charlotte McCulloch has anchored the middle order with a maturity beyond her years, but while Chambers acknowledges all members of the team by name, she reserves special praise for the University of the Plough Islands right-hander Arnold Tyrie. The bespectacled, powerful New Dalmatian has been, according to Chambers, "one of those players with the ability to win or lose a game on his own...his shot selection and ability to build an innings even under these tight conditions has been superb", and Tyrie's fourth half-century of the tournament against Darmen, as he helped carry the team to victory with two balls remaining, underlined his importance.
While the 20-over format has been rightly criticised for abbreviating the tactical nuances of the game, the eyes of the cricketing world have nonetheless been trained on the Young Foxes; Hodgeson has described the increasing media presence at each successive match as "quite surreal", while Tyrie and spinner Robin Vowles have both described having to politely reject offers from Grearian cricketing franchises to uproot them from the Plough Islands and groom them for stardom. However, the impact of this tournament on the team has nonetheless been profound, and may yet reverberate into the future; the Association's head coach Lourens Hendricks did not deny suggestions that some of the Young Foxes might take part in next month's 60th anniversary matches alongside a senior national team, with Hodgeson in particular - with his calm, measured demeanour and abilty to come through in a crisis - being earmarked as a potential future Test player.
The captain, though, is doing his level best for now to remain grounded and focus on the final match to come, insisting that, win or lose, the ultimate destination remains the same. "I have just been telling everybody before the match to obviously strive in unity for the best possible result, but...for some people their lives will take them elsewhere than cricket after this, we might never get to have this experience again, so we want to make sure we are not looking at ourselves and how we should have tried". Though the well-drilled, eager, and battle-hardened Dragonflies will surely be the favourites to win - and Plough Islanders will be the first to congratulate them should they do so - there will be considerable interest back home in the team, and the hopes of a hundred and forty thousand souls from our small country will be riding with Hodgeson and his team in Atheburn tomorrow. Regardless of the outcome, we will be hearing far more from these Young Foxes in the years to come.

PLOUGH ISLANDS CRICKET ASSOCIATION
XI FOR 20 OVER GAME VS.    KO-OREN

        PLAYER           BAT   BOW
#10 JC  Morris           RHB   RLB
#9  RG  Piper            LHB   LMD
#13 ADM Tyrie            RHB   RLB
#11 LM  Scott            LHB   SLA
#8  CAV McCulloch        RHB   ROB
#1  P   Hodgeson (c)     LHB   SLC
#2  DV  Andreyev         RHB   RFM
#3  WC  Barrett (w)      RHB      
#14 RG  Vowles           LHB   SLA
#16 RA  Williams         LHB   LFM
#5  TSF Gibbs            RHB   RLB

[The Grearish Union]

GCF World Twenty20 Championship Final


The Final @ The Atheburn Oval, Atheburn (72,000)
The Plough Islands 176/5 (20 overs)
Ko-oren 200/6 (20 overs)

Ko-oren win by 24 runs and are crowned GCF World Twenty20 champions!

[Gruenberg]

And cutoff for the infinitely more prestigious match in Gruenberg...

Liventia 119 (18.2 overs)
Darmen 110 (14.4 overs)