One Hundred and Five Was Enough: Japan Defend the Smallest Total of Their Tour

A hundred and five is not a total. It is a hope. Japan made 105 for 6 at Sano on Sunday, having been asked to bat first, and every one of the twenty overs they faced was a negotiation rather than an innings — nobody passed 21, the highest partnership was 29, and Nurin Imanina's four wickets cost seventeen runs.

Then they defended it, and the series finished level. There is a particular satisfaction in that for an emerging cricket nation: not the big total or the big chase, but the harder, less glamorous skill of bowling and fielding a side out of a match that the scoreboard said was gone.

H Iwasaki hit five fours in a 16-ball 21 and was bowled in the fifth over, and that turned out to be the fastest scoring Japan managed all innings. A Kano's 15 took 26 balls. M Yanagida's 16 took 22 and did not include a boundary. Erika Oda's 17 took 22.

Nurin Imanina's spell — four overs, one maiden, seventeen runs, four wickets — was the reason. Malaysia used nine bowlers and four of them went at 4.25 an over or less, which is a remarkable collective squeeze and ought to have been enough to win a cricket match.

Japan were 91 for 6 in the eighteenth over. S Kato and A Fujikawa added 14 from the last fourteen balls, and 105 went up on the board looking about fifteen light.

Malaysia lost their first four wickets for 27 inside seven overs and their seventh at 56 in the thirteenth. At that point they needed 50 from 47 balls with three wickets standing, which in women's associate cricket is not a chase so much as an appeal to fortune.

They very nearly got there. SM Dhanusri made 17 not out from 19 at No. 9 and added 12 with Nur Dania Syuhada and then 26 in 22 balls with Nur Qalysha for the ninth wicket. When Qalysha was bowled at 94 with twelve still required, Malaysia had come from 56 for 7 to within two hits of the target.

Aisya Eleesa was bowled first ball to end it. Japan's bowling card is worth reading in full: nine wickets shared between five bowlers, and three of them — A Chandel, Nonoha Yasumoto and S Kato — conceding a combined 34 runs from 8.5 overs for six wickets.

Sano in mid-September produced a slow, low surface on which 199 runs came in 37.5 overs and twelve boundaries were hit in the entire match, all of them fours. Ten of the sixteen wickets to fall were bowled — the clearest possible signal that the ball was keeping low and that batters on both sides were playing for pace that was not there. In that context 105 was closer to par than it appeared.

CricIntel did not preview this series, so there is no call of ours to grade. For the record, Malaysia won the second T20I by 18 runs on the 12th and the first was abandoned without a ball bowled on the 11th, which leaves the three-match series drawn 1-1.

Both sides now move on to knockout cricket, with a quarter-final scheduled for the 17th. The takeaway from this tour is narrower than a drawn series suggests: neither batting order made a fifty across the two completed matches, and both bowling attacks were excellent. That is a pair of teams whose bowling has outrun their batting, and at the next level up, that gets exposed.

For Japan specifically, defending 105 is the sort of result a developing side remembers. A Chandel's 3 for 16 and Nonoha Yasumoto's 2 for 9 were the difference, and both bowled inside the last six overs of a chase that was still live.