MI London Won the Match, Lost the Season, and Found Out on the Last Ball

Sport does not often let you watch a team win and lose at the same time, in the same delivery. Edgbaston did on Wednesday. MI London needed to beat Birmingham Phoenix by 59 runs to finish third and reach Friday's eliminator — a margin that stopped being plausible somewhere around the fortieth ball of the Phoenix chase — and from that moment they were playing for two things that had come apart: the result, which they could still get, and the season, which they could not.

They got the result by two runs. Rehan Ahmed, who had made 23 from 11 and dragged Phoenix within touching distance, was run out going for a second off the last ball of the match. And the champions of the last three editions of The Hundred walked off having won, with nothing to walk on to.

The reason MI London needed 59 was the innings they had just played. One hundred and fifty-seven is a fine total at Edgbaston on any normal evening and a catastrophic one when your season depends on the size of the win. Will Jacks went early. James Vince made a brisk 22 from 12 and left. Nicholas Pooran's 36 from 21 — three sixes, the only sustained violence of the innings — was exactly the sort of knock you want and about forty runs shorter than the situation required. Jason Roy's 26 from 21 was steady in a match where steady was the wrong currency. By the time Ollie Sykes and Tom Curran were scrambling at the end, the mathematics had already been settled: they needed 216, not 157.

Chris Wood's 2 for 28 for Phoenix is worth naming. A side that had lost seven in a row and had nothing but pride left bowled with a clarity that MI London's batters could not match.

What the last twenty balls proved is that MI London are still, on the evidence, a very good T20 side. Phoenix needed a modest amount and had wickets; Joe Weatherley's 42 from 31 had given them the platform, Sean Dickson and Jordan Thompson had kept it alive, and Rehan Ahmed at the death is as dangerous a lower-order hitter as the competition has. Richard Gleeson's 2 for 29 kept the equation from ever getting comfortable, and Trent Boult, who has spent fifteen years being the person you want bowling the last set, bowled the last set. The yorkers landed. The second run off the final delivery was two feet too ambitious, and Rehan was gone.

Gleeson took Player of the Match and said the thing everybody was thinking: to win five games and not qualify, when two other teams had done exactly the same, was disappointing — and was also a fair description of how strong the competition had become. Sam Curran's assessment of his own side was blunter still. Eight games, five wins. Probably fair.

For Birmingham Phoenix, this is the end of a season that had one win in it. Four points from eight matches, bottom of the table, seven consecutive defeats before Wednesday and an eighth on the night — and yet the final ball of their campaign was played with the game genuinely alive. That is not nothing. Weatherley's 42 and Rehan's 23 from 11 are the two performances to carry into the winter, and the honest reckoning is about the top order: a side that can chase 158 to within two runs is not a side without cricketers. It is a side that spent eight weeks losing the first thirty balls of matches.

Edgbaston under lights played fairly — 157 and 155 in reply, a run rate of 1.57 a ball for the side batting first, no obvious dew advantage and no obvious first-innings tax. It was a good pitch for a close game and a bad pitch for the specific thing MI London needed, which was a massacre. There is no surface in England that hands you a 59-run win to order.

CricIntel did not preview this fixture — we published previews across MI London's earlier group games but not for the final round at Edgbaston — so there is no call of ours to defend or disown here, and we would rather say that than invent one. The read we will own from the week is broader: we spent the back half of this tournament writing about who would top the table and not enough about the net-run-rate logjam behind it. Three teams finished on five wins. Only one of them is still playing.

Trent Rockets finish top on 24 points and go directly to Sunday's final at Lord's. Sunrisers Leeds and Manchester Super Giants meet at The Oval on Friday for the other place. MI London's three-year hold on The Hundred is over, and the manner of it — a two-run win on the last ball of the last group game — will be the detail that survives. Phoenix, meanwhile, have a winter to work out how a squad containing Rehan Ahmed and Chris Wood finished bottom, and a last-ball defeat is a strange but genuinely useful thing to build from.