Craig Overton Beats Twin Jamie With a Six at the Death — and He Didn’t Even Middle It

There is one scoreboard the Overton twins have kept their whole lives, and it hangs at no ground. It runs between them — Craig and Jamie, two boys from Devon who learned the game against each other and have spent a career trying to prove something to the only opponent who knows every flaw in the other. On a loud night at Trent Bridge, Craig settled the latest entry in that private ledger himself, with the bat, off his brother’s bowling.

That is the part worth sitting with. Craig Overton is not a batsman. His whole career is filed the other way round: a bowling all-rounder, the tall seamer whose runs arrive as a bonus, the Somerset man who has worn the same badge since he broke in more than a decade ago, while his twin went looking for a bigger stage. When the match narrowed to a handful of deliveries, the player sent to win it was the one whose batting the record books treat as an afterthought — facing the one bowler alive who knows exactly how he plays.

He did not win it beautifully. Needing double figures off the final five balls, Craig went after Jamie and top-edged him — a thick, skied strike that cleared deep fine leg for six rather than the clean boundary he was hunting. Then he ran. Two twos, sprinted hard, and it was done. No signature drive, no crack through the line. An ugly six and a pair of scrambles. And that is precisely why it reads as character and not luck: the lower-order man did not flinch and did not try to become someone he isn’t. He backed himself to make contact, and trusted his legs for the rest.

Jamie is the more obviously gifted athlete of the two — a genuine quick who has been clocked around ninety miles per hour, the twin who left home for Surrey and now owns the flashier white-ball CV, once named the player of an entire Hundred season. If you were designing a bowler to defend a target against Craig Overton, you would build Jamie. That is what makes the outcome land. The brother built for the moment lost it to the brother built to bowl.

Ben Duckett, who had done the heavy lifting earlier with a commanding innings of his own, never doubted it. “There was no doubt that he was going to go and do it,” Duckett said afterward. “He’s been unbelievable for Somerset this year, so with him walking out, hitting downwind and facing his brother, I knew we had a chance.” Note what a team-mate reaches for first: not Craig’s technique, but his certainty.

The arithmetic, for the record: chasing a target of 160, Trent Rockets got home by four wickets with two balls to spare, and Craig finished 20 not out from six balls. He had already been busy with the ball, catching and bowling Jonny Bairstow for nothing and removing Lhuan-dre Pretorius. It amounted to a complete night’s work in a competition that mostly rewards specialists — the all-rounder doing a little of everything, then everything at the last. Elsewhere on the card Jos Buttler was flaying ninety from fifty balls, and that is the innings that will travel furthest tonight. It shouldn’t be the one that lasts.

Because somewhere the twins are still keeping their own count, in a rivalry no scorer records, and this one belongs to Craig — the quieter brother, the one who stayed, winning the family’s only fixture that matters with a shot he would never coach and never apologise for.

Tags: take-review, Craig Overton, cricket, Jamie Overton, The Hundred, Trent Rockets