Manchester Super Giants vs Birmingham Phoenix Review — Buttler Empties Old Trafford's Stands of Doubt: 90 from 50, and an 87-Run Rout

There are innings where Jos Buttler looks like he is solving a problem, and innings where he looks like he has simply decided the problem is beneath him. Sunday at Emirates Old Trafford was firmly the second kind. Ninety from fifty balls, seven fours and five sixes, and by the time he was done the match had stopped being a contest and started being an exhibition. Manchester Super Giants posted 187 for 5. Birmingham Phoenix were bowled out for 100. The 87-run margin is the biggest MSG have managed in T20 cricket, beating the 81-run win they recorded against Sunrisers.

What gives the scoreline its edge is what Phoenix had done 48 hours earlier at Edgbaston, where they piled up 214 for 4 and defended it against Trent Rockets. Same competition, same format, forty-eight hours apart, and a swing of more than a hundred runs in what they could produce with the bat. The Hundred does that to sides — a hundred balls leaves no room to correct a bad start — but rarely this brutally.

Buttler's method at Old Trafford was the one that has made him the most destructive English white-ball batter of his generation: stillness, then violence. He does not throw his hands at the ball early; he waits, lets the length reveal itself, and then transfers weight so late that fielders positioned correctly for the shot he plays still finish ten yards out of position. Five sixes and seven fours from fifty deliveries means he scored roughly two-thirds of his runs in boundaries, and yet the innings never felt like slogging. Ninety is the second-highest score made in The Hundred at this ground, and it was built without a single obvious moment of luck.

He was well supported, which mattered. Heinrich Klaasen's 20 kept the middle honest, and Tom Moores turned a good total into a punishing one with an unbeaten 39 from 17 balls containing five maximums — the sort of late acceleration that adds thirty runs nobody accounted for when the field settings were planned. From 187, MSG were bowling with a cushion large enough to attack from ball one.

Phoenix's reply was the collapse of a batting order that never found a partnership. One hundred all out in a competition where the average competitive total sits comfortably above 150 is not a slow innings — it is a broken one, and Liam Dawson did most of the breaking. His 3 for 15 was slow left-arm bowling of the unglamorous, unanswerable kind: flat enough to deny room, slow enough to make the big shot a gamble, accurate enough that the gamble was the only option left. Scott Currie's unbeaten 14 was the top score, which tells its own story about how little resistance the top order offered.

Phoenix will point out, fairly, that 214 at Edgbaston proves the batting works. What Sunday exposed is the dependency: when the top three fail in a hundred-ball match, there is no runway left for the middle order to rebuild. That is not a Birmingham problem specifically, it is a format problem — but the sides who win this tournament are the ones who find 130 on the nights the plan collapses, and Phoenix found 100.

Manchester Super Giants, meanwhile, are two from two at home and top of the men's table, joining Welsh Fire as the only unbeaten sides after the opening week. Their first win — a seven-run squeeze over London Spirit at Lord's built on Tim Seifert's 67 — came from holding a small total. This one came from making a large one and enforcing it ruthlessly. A side that can win both ways in the first week of a short tournament is a side worth taking seriously.

The competition now moves to the Rose Bowl, where Southern Brave — still without a win — host MI London on Monday evening. Phoenix, 1-1, get their answer to this at Southampton on July 30.