Gous, Smith tons help Freedom script highest successful T20 chase

Washington Freedom pulled off the highest successful chase in T20 history, running down 266 to beat defending champions MI New York by six wickets in the Eliminator of MLC 2026 at the Oakland Coliseum, a game that also produced the format's joint second biggest partnership (241) and, at 51, more sixes than any T20 match has managed before.

Andries Gous made 132 and Steve Smith an unbeaten 110, their stand of 241 in 89 balls eclipsing the previous record for any wicket in domestic/franchise leagues - set by Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers in 2016 - as Freedom got home with eight balls to spare and knocked out the holders.

MI New York's total had been built on a blistering ton from Nicholas Pooran, who was just one ball slower than Chris Gayle's record 30-ball century, with strong support from Kieron Pollard's 64 and Quinton de Kock's 51. It would take a spell from an unlikely source - Rachin Ravindra, finishing with 4 for 29 - to give Freedom any hope of making the impossible possible.

There is a point in T20 cricket, reached more often now than the format's early theorists ever imagined, where scores stop feeling like scores and start to feel like weather - something that happens to you, rather than something you chase. But for half the game, 266 looked like exactly that kind of number. By the time Freedom had finished with it, 266 looked instead like an opening bid.

Because this was modern T20 batting on a flat surface and skewed boundary sizes at its absolute best, dealt almost entirely in sixes. Despite joining hands at 10 for 2, Gous and Smith batted with the peculiar calm of men who had decided, quite early, that the game's usual anxieties would not apply to them tonight, not when they had nothing left to lose in an Eliminator after conceding 266. MI New York, for a long time, had reason to feel serene about all this. Until they began putting down catches. Shakib Al Hasan dropped one, Pollard dropped one, and Nostush Kenjige spilled another sitter.

Between all of that, Gous and Smith rained sixes on MI New York. Straight after Kenjige dropped Smith, Gous smashed Romario Shepherd for four sixes in a row before closing out that 13th over - 29 runs in all - with a four. Pollard went for 21 in the next and finished it by firing the ball back towards Smith in frustration, then walked off the field to tend to an injured finger, dislocated while dropping a catch. Tajinder Dhillon bowled the over after that and gave away 31, as MI New York conceded a staggering 81 runs across those three overs alone.

It reduced a chase whose asking rate had hovered around 14 an over for most of the innings to a pedestrian 42 off 30. There was also some symmetry amid the brutality. Both batters took 40 balls to reach their centuries, neatly wrapping up milestones of their own. Gous became the first American player to score an MLC hundred, while Smith, so long known for his steely powers of concentration in the whites, now had his fastest T20 hundred, fortifying his frequent claims to feature at the LA Olympics in 2028.

By the end, a gobsmacked MI New York team was left pondering how it had all come down to this. They had been equally incredible with the bat, if not more destructive, hitting a record 29 sixes. At the end of 13 overs of their innings they had 211 on the board, with Pollard batting on 42 off 14. That is when Smith turned to Ravindra, and the left-arm spinner repaid the faith by bowling the innings' first boundary-less over - and taking the wicket of Dhillon with it. Ravindra struck twice more in his next over, dismissing Shakib and Romario Shepherd, and then took out Kunwarjeet Singh in his third. Despite giving away 16 in his final over, Ravindra finished with astonishing figures of 4 for 29. MI New York could manage just 33 from their final five overs in the most defining phase of one of the more chaotic games T20 cricket has seen.

Brief scores: MI New York 266/9 in 20 overs (Nicholas Pooran 106, Kieron Pollard 64, Quinton de Kock 51; Rachin Ravindra 4-29) lost to Washington Freedom 270/4 in 18.4 overs (Andries Gous 132, Steve Smith 110*; Shakib Al Hasan 2-34) by six wickets.