NewsHobart Hurricanes have slipped out of the BBL after a 57-run defeat to the Sydney Sixers at the SCG, and the feeling around the camp is one of chances missed rather than a single bad night.
Stand-in skipper Ben McDermott was brutally honest once the chase ended at 141 all out. “We haven’t really nailed it with the bat all season,” he admitted, before adding, “It’s probably one of those nights where we were due to bail our bowlers out of the crap, so to speak. But not our night.”
The key facts first. Steven Smith’s brisk 65 set up the Sixers’ 198 for 6. Hobart, minus injured captain Nathan Ellis, never kept up. A tidy 48-run partnership between McDermott and Beau Webster flickered, then fizzled, Joel Davies and Sean Abbott closing it out with the ball.
Ellis watched on, a fresh hamstring scan ruling him out of both this match and, more importantly, the T20 World Cup run-in. McDermott did not dodge the impact. Losing the side’s main death bowler, he said, was “huge”. “Death bowling wins you tournaments and when you lose one of the best in the world, in my opinion, it’s going to hurt,” he explained.
The gap showed. Smith and Davies took 45 off the last three overs; Hobart’s back-end plans looked thin. Chris Jordan played despite a sore ankle yet did not bowl, a late call that left the XI light on seamers. “But Chris has finished games before, he’s got the power game. He can clear the ropes. I think it was the right call,” McDermott argued, although hindsight may be harsher.
If one moment sums up the season it is a three-run loss to Brisbane Heat in the final league fixture. Win that, the Hurricanes would have topped the table and hosted the Qualifier. Instead, they faced two sudden-death matches in three days. “That Brisbane Heat game is always to be a talking point, no matter what happened in our season from there, whether we went on to win it or we bow out in the semi,” McDermott reflected. “You can always look back on that and go, ‘We probably should have had a home qualifier’.”
So the defending champions go out early, their title defence undone by an untimely hamstring, a tight defeat in Brisbane and, yes, a batting group that never quite clicked. The Sixers head west to meet Perth Scorchers; Hobart head home to wonder what if.
