Rashid Khan Took Five for Seventeen at The Oval and Manchester Super Giants' Second Defeat Looked Nothing Like Their First

There is a particular sound a crowd makes when a bowler is midway through something historic and everyone in the ground has worked it out at the same moment. The Oval made it on Sunday night, somewhere around Rashid Khan's fourth wicket, and it did not stop for the rest of his spell.

Five for 17. In a format engineered to make bowlers into background scenery — twenty balls, no protection, a crowd that came to watch the ball leave the ground — Rashid Khan conceded fewer than a run a delivery and removed half a batting order. It is his first five-wicket haul in The Hundred and only the fifth of his entire T20 career, which for a bowler with his record tells you how rare five-fors are in twenty-ball allocations rather than how rare they are for him. Manchester Super Giants were 138 all out and beaten by 45.

The innings that made the night possible came first, and it came from Will Jacks. Sixty-two from 31 with six sixes is a strike rate north of 200 at a ground that has been the least generous big London venue in this competition — dry square, early turn, long straight boundaries at the Vauxhall End that punish the lofted drive. Jacks did not go straight. He went square and he went hard, and by the time he was done MI London had the platform that a 183 needs.

Nicholas Pooran's 54 from 28 was the compounding effect. There is no more brutal batter in the world game right now when the field is set for someone else, and Pooran's ability to take the pressure release balls — the one-a-ball delivery that most batters accept — and hit them for six is what turns a good total into an unchaseable one. James Vince's 29 was the unglamorous glue. Together they made 183 for 6 on a surface where 160 would have been a competitive score.

Manchester Super Giants deserve better than being written off after two defeats in a fortnight, because for the first half of this tournament they were the best side in it — played four, won four, with Jos Buttler in the form of his life. But the pattern of the last two games is worth naming honestly. At Old Trafford they finished 137 for 3, seven wickets unused, and lost. At The Oval they went all out for 138. Those are opposite failures, and a side that produces both inside three days does not have a technical problem so much as an unsettled sense of how hard to push.

Aiden Markram's 50 was the exception and the indictment at once. He is not, by temperament, the batter you want carrying a chase of 184 on his own; he did it anyway because nobody stayed with him. When Rashid is bowling twenty balls of high-quality leg spin at a middle order that has just lost its rhythm, one man batting well is not a plan, it is a delay.

The Oval played exactly as advertised — and that is the point. Of the three major London grounds it is the one that behaves least like a batting paradise: the square is dry, the ball grips earlier in the innings than at Lord's or Chelmsford, and slow bowling is a genuine wicket-taking option rather than a containment measure. Rashid's figures are the loudest evidence, but the shape of the whole chase supports it. Sides that arrive at The Oval planning to bat the way they bat at Trent Bridge spend thirty balls being surprised, and by then the game has moved.

CricIntel prediction review. We got the mechanism right and the man wrong. Our preview said The Oval is 'the one big London ground where the ball grips,' that MI London's whole plan should be to get slow bowling into the Super Giants' top order as early as the surface allowed, and that spin would decide it. It did — 5 for 17 of it. We also wrote that if the Super Giants arrived at the eightieth ball with wickets in hand again they would lose; instead they were bowled out, and lost anyway, which is the same conclusion by a different route. Where we missed: we built the entire spin plan around getting the ball to Jos Buttler and around whether Will Jacks would bowl his own off-spin, and the wickets came from Rashid Khan, who barely featured in our preview. We also expected Buttler and Heinrich Klaasen to be the story of the chase; it was Markram's lone fifty. A good read of the surface, a poor read of the personnel.

What to watch. MI London are second on 12 points, ahead of Welsh Fire only on net run rate — and a 45-run win is exactly the sort of margin that decides a knockout place in the last week of a group stage. Jacks and Pooran at the top of that order, with Rashid holding twenty balls in reserve for whenever the game needs breaking, is as complete a spine as anyone has assembled this season. For Manchester Super Giants, the fix is a conversation rather than a selection: they have the best batter in the tournament and two defeats in a row produced by opposite errors. Get the tempo settled and their unbeaten fortnight looks like the truth and this week looks like the aberration. Leave it another game, and the standings will decide for them.