Melbourne Renegades opener Tim Seifert eclipsed his best BBL score of 55 midway through the 11th over, propelling his team to a league record score at Geelong’s GMHBA Stadium.
The Renegades got their BBL15 campaign off to a flying start at their secondary home in Geelong, becoming the first franchise in 14 games there (including the predecessor State Big Bash) to post a 200+ score at the bayside venue.
It was expected to be an evenly matched contest on the basis of both teams finishing just one point apart near the bottom of the 2024-25 standings, whilst the Renegades came into the match with a very poor all-time record in Geelong.
Heat openers Josh Brown and Tim Seifert needed a few overs to get adjusted to a surprisingly quick GHMBA Stadium surface, crawling along to a score of 1/28 during the four-over powerplay, but their attempts to get things going were ably assisted by the Brisbane Heat bowlers routinely ending each over with poor sixth deliveries.
By the end of the sixth over, Seifert had helped accelerate the Renegades to 1/47 – 24 runs of which had come from the final delivery of an over, with the likes of Liam Haskett, Jack Wildermuth and Xavier Bartlett all ending what were otherwise tight overs with late reprieves.
After sensing a touch of up-and-down bounce on a good length early, the Renegades’ batters made a ploy to go after anything full, and the Heat bowlers served that up in spades both before and after the fresh pitch had begun to settle.
Seifert turned things in the Renegades’ favour with three consecutive boundaries off the bowling of Haskett in the eighth over, including back-to-back scoops to a vacant fine leg, whilst at the other end Jake Fraser-McGurk completed yet another short lived innings (14 off 7) by trying to slog sweep the fast bowling of Jack Wildermuth.
Seifert passed 50 and then took a liking to the part-time bowling of Nathan McSweeney, stretching out to scythe a wide offside delivery over cover-point and then slog sweeping another full ball into the empty top deck of the Reg Hickey Stand to his left.
The Renegades activated the Power Surge with Seifert in fine touch and added 28 runs for the loss of no wicket thanks to a 19-run over from Shaheen Shah Afridi, who bowled two poorly directed bouncers and a slower ball that the settled Seifert had picked.
Seifert went past Sam Harper’s BBL ground record of 73 in the 13th over and was ably assisted by Victorian rising star Ollie Peake who, in his just his second BBL appearance, struck at 12 runs per over throughout his 26-ball stay with some classy boundary hitting.
Unfortunately for the Heat, there were far too many full ‘hit me’ deliveries that took any variability in the pitch out of play and Seifert and Peake were able to construct a superb game-winning partnership of 121 runs from just 57 deliveries, including Seifert almost doubling his best score of 55 from last season.
The worst of the bowling came from new marquee Pakistan import Shaheen Shah Afridi, who was taken out of the attack after conceding 43 runs from just 2.4 overs.
Delivering three waist-high full tosses, two of which were deemed to be dangerous, saw his night come to an end prematurely – and it forced Heat captain Nathan McSweeney to give the similarly expensive Haskett (0-45) an unplanned fourth over.
Heat quick Jack Wildermuth was the pick of the bowlers with his 3-34 and, in an unexpected turn of events that was announced pre-game on the Heat team sheet, the lower order batter came out to open with Kiwi veteran and former skipper Colin Munro.
Opening the batting in the BBL for just the second in his career, and the first since doing so in 2018/19 in Renegades’ colours, Wildermuth recorded precisely the same score as his first attempt – 0 for 2, gone in the first over caught behind off the bowling of Renegades recruit Jason Behrendorff.
American gun Hassan Khan kept the pressure on the run chase with a superb run-out of McSweeney inside the powerplay and, despite being able to get some partnerships started, no Brisbane pair were able to make anything close to the impact of the Seifert-Peake stand.
Behrendorff’s class came to the fore throughout his first three overs and he made an immediate impact when outsmarting Max Bryant with a slower ball that was whipped to deep square, and as a result Bryant would finish with an unimpactful 14 from 16 balls.
The Heat recorded 1-23 from their Power Surge but the loss of Bryant during it was not helpful and Brisbane found themselves needing 13.5 runs per over thereafter.
Munro desperately needed someone to stay with him but the game was well and truly lost when he and number seven Xavier Bartlett both departed in a crucial over bowled by Will Sutherland, with both batters just trying desperately to keep up with the required run rate.
Jimmy Peirson, who had been held back to number nine because of that mounting requirement, ironcailly played the kind of innings that Munro needed alongside him earlier in the run chase, albeit when the Renegades had taken their foot off the pedal, and his 21-ball half-century had given the visitors just a slight sniff of victory in the death overs.
But whilst the 33-year-old wicketkeeper played himself into some better form than the run of poor returns experienced in both the Sheffield Shield and Dean Jones Trophy this season, the run chase otherwise fizzled out throughout the second half and the home side picked up just their second win from seven completed matches in Geelong since the start of the 2021/22 season in front of a healthy Monday night crowd of 10,043.
