Watch: Irish batter Curtis Campher played a daring scoop shot against a 92mph Mark Wood delivery as Ireland registered a famous win over England at Melbourne in the 2022 T20 World Cup.
Campher was on 14 off nine deliveries when he decided to play the shot against England’s premier quick bowler. Wood has been bowling with great pace since his return from injury, sending down statistically the fastest four-over spell ever in T20 World Cup history against Afghanistan in England’s previous game. Campher is also in good form himself, having scored a rapid 72* to take Ireland to victory over Scotland in the warm-up stage of the tournament last week.
With Ireland collapsing to 134-5, having been 103-1 at one point, Wood bowled to Campher in the 17th over, searching for his third wicket of the day. The Irish batter pre-meditated the shot, moving across his stumps even before the ball left Wood’s hand. By the time the blisteringly fast delivery reached him, Campher was barely looking at the ball, moving over to the off-side and exposing all three stumps.
Somehow, the right-hander managed to flick the ball over his shoulder, evading both Jos Buttler behind the stumps and Ben Stokes on the fine-leg boundary. It was clever from Campher to use the pace of Wood as the ball rocketed down to the boundary, bouncing just once before going over the ropes.
Wood had his revenge the very next ball, however, dismissing Campher caught behind after the batter got himself in a mess attempting a pull-shot and edging down the leg-side to Buttler.
Despite Wood’s best efforts picking up three wickets, England slumped to a shock defeat, damaging their hopes of progressing past the Super 12 and piling the pressure on for their fixture against Australia on Friday. With rain threatening throughout the fixture, England were never up with the par score they needed to be ahead on DLS after losing Buttler on the second ball of the innings. Things went from bad to worse for the pre-tournament favourites as they lost a steady flow of wickets and struggled to score fluently off the Irish bowling attack.
When the rain finally brought proceedings to an end, England were five short of the total they needed to be at in order to claim a DLS victory, Moeen Ali having scored 12 runs from the three balls that preceded the downpour. The match never got back underway, however, and Ireland wrapped up their first victory over England in a T20 World Cup. Their next match is against Afghanistan on Friday.
Watch Campher’s audacious shot here:
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