Vitality Blast Women 2025 delivers coverage on 18 June with all matches streamed live, plus detailed match reports, video highlights, and stats.
Warwickshire Women vs Essex Women, Match 27, Vitality Blast Women
Warwickshire 154 for eight, beat Essex, 150 for three, by two wickets.
Warwickshire continued their impressive Women’s Vitality Blast charge with a tense two-wicket win over Essex at Edgbaston.
Georgia Davis’s side recorded their fourth win in five games after chasing down Essex’s 150 for three. Cordelia Griffith (47 not out, 36 balls) and Madeline Penna (41 not out, 42 balls) pulled the visitors round from 56 for three but never escaped the shackles of a disciplined attack.
Warwickshire then slipped to 43 for four in reply but recovered to reach 154 for eight with one ball to spare as Charis Pavely struck a dynamic unbeaten 68 from 40 balls with five fours and three sixes.
Essex chose to bat and started solidly as openers Lauren Winfield-Hill and Grace Scrivens added 44 in 35 balls before Scrivens fell to the antepenultimate ball of the powerplay when she skied a slog at Phoebe Graham to mid-wicket.
Laura Harris took that catch and accepted another four balls later when Alice Macleod drove Hannah Baker to extra cover. Those two blows for Essex were quickly followed by a big self-inflicted one. Winfield-Hill, on 30 from 23 balls, was called for a quick single by Griffith, hesitated and was run out by bowler Davis who chased the ball down with the precision and purpose with which she used, as a police officer, to chase villains round Walsall.
The loss of three wickets for 12 runs in 11 balls required some shoring up and Griffith and Penna stemmed the collapse before seeking to accelerate. Each hit six fours in an unbroken stand of 94 from 75 balls to assure a competitive, if less than imposing total.
MacGregor, leading wicket-taker in the competition, inflicted brisk damage on Warwickshire’s reply with two wickets in her second over. Davina Perrin chipped a low full toss to mid on and Meg Austin top-edged a leg-side scoop to the wicketkeeper.
Essex’s bowlers continued to exploit Warwickshire’s top-order carelessness as Natasha Wraith swung Eva Gray to deep mid-wicket and Sterre Kalis missed an attempted cut at Abtaha Maqsood’s first ball and was bowled.
That left Warwickshire 43 for four which could have been worse had an early big hit to long on from Pavely off Sophia Smale not passed through the hands of Penna for six. Pavely survived to add 43 in 28 balls with Issy Wong (33, 25) who batted responsibly to rebuild the innings but then misjudged a second run and was beaten by Joanne Gardner’s throw.
Harris swept Gray to short fine leg but Pavely pulled MacGregor into the Hollies Stand for six to leave Warwickshire needing 35 from five overs. Successive fours took her to a 31-ball half-century and another handsome six, off Jodi Grewcock, put the equation firmly into the home side’s hands with just three needed from the last over.
Scrivens started it with a dot ball and a wicket – Davis caught at mid on – but two singles followed to level the scores with two balls left and Baker struck the next to the mid-wicket boundary.
Warwickshire all-rounder Charis Pavely said:
“It was one of those situations where it either comes off or it doesn’t and luckily it did for me today. It’s a case of having the confidence to go for it in those conditions. Sometimes you come off and sometimes you don’t but it was nice to play that role today.
“I just try to let the ball hit the middle of the bat. It wasn’t the intention to go out there and swing at everything but suddenly the runs just started accumulating and it went in my favour.
“Ideally, you would want to win it in 18 or 19 overs, not the last over, but we paced the chase really well from the position we were in and the girls who came in at the end were great, knowing their plans and how they rotated the strike really well.
“We have a really good team atmosphere at the moment. We all back each other so much and that is what is contributing to the great environment we are creating in the changing room.
Essex Performance Director. Danni Warren, said:
“It was a brilliant game of cricket and fantastic that there were so many schoolchildren there to enjoy it. It was a really exciting finish and hopefully some of them will be inspired to play cricket and even look at it as a potential career.
“It was a great, fluctuating game. T20 seems short but there are always phases to a match and that’s what can make it so exciting. We lost some wickets but then recovered well with the bat but thought we might have been maybe ten or 15 short.
“That turned out to be the case. Credit to Charis Paveley who batted really well but I am proud of the girls for taking it so deep, into the last over. They really showed their fighting abilities.”
Surrey Women vs Lancashire Women, Match 28, Vitality Blast Women
Surrey 171-9 beat Lancashire 118 all out by 53 runs
By Jon Batham ECB Reporters’ Network supported by Rothesay
Ryana MacDonald-Gay and Phoebe Franklin shared seven wickets to spark a Lancashire collapse and lead Surrey to a 53-run victory at the Oval – their seventh win in eight Vitality games.
Franklin (3-19) and MacDonald-Gay (4-14) wrestled back control for the league leaders as the visitors crumbled from 102-3 to 118 all out chasing 172 for victory. Their heroics followed a 70-run stand between Emma Lamb, (64 from 46), and Ellie Threlkeld 32 which threatened to snatch an unlikely win for the Red Rose county.
All this drama came after Grace Harris (57 from 31) and Paige Schofield (37) shared a fifth-wicket stand of 69 to help the hosts recover from 17-3 to 171-9
For the second home game in a row, Surrey’s much-vaunted batting line-up was soon in trouble. Skipper Bryony Smith slapped the first ball for four, but was bowled by the second from Sophie Morris which skidded onto middle-stump. Sophia Dunkley inside-edged a full toss onto off-stump and confusion in running left Kira Chathli stranded.
Danni Wyatt-Hodge, involved in the mix-up, was starved of strike and became fretful before dancing down the pitch to Morris to be stumped by Threlkeld to leave Surrey 50-4.
Harris looked like she was batting on a different pitch, striking the ball powerfully down the ground before pulling a short one from Morris over deep-square for six as she marched to 50 in 28 balls.
Scholfield struggled initially and was dropped in the deep by Eve Jones on 11. The reprieve loosened her shoulders – a huge six over mid-wicket the pick of her shots in the stand of 69.
However, England stars Kate Cross and Lamb removed both batters in quick succession and thereafter only a few late blows from Tash Farrant carried the hosts to what looked an under-par 171.
An early missed stumping chance by Chathli off Tilly Corteen-Coleman which reprieved Lamb didn’t help the cause, but the unlucky bowler struck later in the same over trapping Eve Jones lbw.
The slow left-armer returned to castle Seren Smale and when MacDonald-Gay found the edge of Fi Morris’s bat, Lancashire were 32-3 at the end of the powerplay.
Lamb though, who also survived a close call for a run out, creamed one from Harris to the cover fence to signal she remained a threat, while Farrant just failed to hold onto a flashing drive from Threlkeld.
Lamb and Threlkeld hoisted Corteen-Coleman over the ropes at mid-wicket and mid-off respectively, the former moving to 50 from 36 balls, before four boundaries in the next over from Alice Davidson-Richards suggested a momentum shift.
Franklin though struck back to have Threlkeld stumped to end a stand of 70 in a brilliant over which conceded only 1 and brilliant fielding by Franklin and MacDonald-Gay in the next over saw the dangerous Ailsa Lister run out for nought.
Lamb was then bowled by Macdonald-Gay, who in company with Franklin routed the tail.
Surrey all-rounder Phoebe Franklin said: “I just wanted to keep mixing it up and not let the batters settle or attack me too much.
“As seamers we always communicate about when slower balls are working and that was a pitch towards the end where cutters were gripping, so that made it a bit harder for the batters and forced them to take a chance somewhere else.
“We know the outfield is quick here, so I wanted to make sure it didn’t go over the rope. I was tumbling over the boundary when I heard everyone cheer, so Mac obviously cleaned up pretty well.
“We probably thought 171 was under par as 180-200 was the goal when I went in. We believed we could defend it.
“We really care for each other. Fielders are putting in the effort in the field to help the bowlers perform.
“We’ve been telling Ryana to back her strengths and keep it as simple as possible and getting that ball to nip back in.
Lancashire head coach Chris Read: “From our point of all we weren’t at our best in the field where we missed a couple of chances which would have kept Surrey to considerably less than they ended up getting, though with short boundaries and a good wicket, we thought at halfway we were right in the game.
“Harris played beautifully but to get her and Scholfield out before they could really accelerate at the death was a positive for us and 172 represented a very chaseable target.
“But aside from the partnership between Emma (Lamb) and Ellie (Threlkeld) we didn’t really get going and once that got broken everything petered away at the end as the rate got a bit big.
“Surrey responded to the couple of big overs we had with a couple of tidy ones and then all of a sudden both the set batters are out and the rate was back up to 12 an over which was quite steep for the girls coming in.”
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