| Vitality Blast quarter-final, Edgbaston |
| Hampshire Hawks 186-6 (20 overs): McDermott 61, Weatherley 47, Vince 31; Brathwaite 4-30 |
| Birmingham Bears 82 (13.3 overs): Fuller 4-17, Ellis 3-4, Wheal 2-9 |
| Hampshire Hawks beat Birmingham Bears by 104 runs |
| Match scorecard |
Birmingham Bears suffered their second-worst defeat in Twenty20 cricket as Hampshire won by 104 runs at Edgbaston to reach T20 Blast Finals Day for a record ninth time.
Australian Ben McDermott hammered 61 off 36 balls to help Hampshire reach 186-6, but the Bears buckled in reply.
James Fuller (4-17), Nathan Ellis (3-4) and Brad Wheal (2-9) did the damage as the hosts were skittled for just 82.
That was their third-lowest score in the 20 years of T20 cricket in England.
This season’s leading Bears run-scorer Adam Hose top-scored with 16 and England’s Olly Stone hit a breezy late 15 not out, but it was otherwise an embarrassing effort.
Hampshire’s innings was chiefly fuelled by a 93-run opening stand between Australian wicketkeeper McDermott and skipper James Vince.
Home captain Carlos Brathwaite came on to remove the pair of them in the space of four balls in the 10th over.
But, although they lost momentum when Tom Prest followed cheaply, a further key stand of 69 in seven overs between Joe Weatherley and Worcestershire old boy Ross Whiteley got them back on course.
Brathwaite took a further couple of wickets to earn the West Indian his best T20 bowling figures for the Bears. But it was still a fairly imposing total, even against a free-scoring Bears side who had amassed 200-plus scores in seven of their 14 group games.
The hosts got off to a bad start in reply when Paul Stirling, Alex Davies and Sam Hain all departed cheaply inside the first five overs – and there was no way back from that as wickets fell regularly until the end came with six and a half overs unused.
A second quarter-final loss in successive years means the Bears, winners for the only time in 2014, have now not made it to Finals Day since 2017.
Two-time T20 Blast champions Hampshire join Wednesday night’s winners Yorkshire back at Edgbaston on 16 July.
The other two quarter-finals are Lancashire v Essex, a repeat of the 2019 quarter-final, this time actually in Manchester, followed by Somerset against Derbyshire on Saturday night.
Lancashire, who have won the trophy just once, in 2015, will be looking to match Hampshire’s haul of nine Finals Day appearances.
Birmingham Bears captain Carlos Brathwaite told BBC Radio WM:
“It’s tough to take, when you feel you deserve more, given the way we played throughout the whole campaign.
“It’s so disappointing to put in one of the worst, if not the worst, performances of the season in such a key game.
“You have give credit to the opposition. They played well and we were just not up to it. But we just need to take all the positive mentality from this year’s campaign and look at making Finals Day next year.
“If you look at the way the club was in T20 cricket a couple of years ago, I still think we’ve got a lot to be proud of.”
Hampshire captain James Vince told BBC Radio Solent:
“It’s really pleasing to come to Edgbaston, where we have lost a few one-day games in recent years, and put in a performance like that.
“We got off to a decent start with the knock that Ben McDermott played up top and then, after me and him got out in the same over, Weathers and Ross rebuilt but still found boundaries.
“We felt that 186 was a good total in a quarter-final but it was a good wicket so we knew we had to bowl well – and the guys did that.
“We had done a lot of homework on them and knew they would come hard at us and that would create chances for us, and once we got three or four out they were under the pump. We tried to get Paul Stirling early, we did that and then everything just seemed to come off perfectly.”
