A Hundred at Each End and Only One That Counted: Nepal Beat the UAE by 44 Runs to Win the ACC Men's Premier Cup

Rahul Chopra was on 100 not out when the ACC Men's Premier Cup final ended. He had faced 105 balls, hit three fours and four sixes, watched seven partners come and go, and he was standing twenty-two yards from the strike when Haider Ali was dismissed and the United Arab Emirates' innings closed on 269. There is no harder place to be in cricket than unbeaten at the end of a chase that failed.

At the other end of the day was Aasif Sheikh, who made 102 from 106 and will not be remembered as the best batter on the field — only as the one on the winning side. Nepal won by 44 runs, and the gap between those two hundreds is the whole story of the match: Sheikh had support, Chopra mostly did not.

Nepal's innings was constructed in three clean movements, which is rarer in associate cricket than it ought to be. Sheikh and Arjun Kumal put on 98 in 129 balls for the second wicket — patient, almost old-fashioned, a rate barely above four. Then Sheikh and captain Rohit Paudel added 68 in 53. Then Paudel and Gulsan Jha added 67 in 54, and Jha took the innings somewhere it had no right to go.

Jha's 52 came from 38 balls with four sixes, and it arrived in the overs where finals are usually strangled. Ibrar Ahmad finished with 4 for 62 and was UAE's most dangerous bowler all day, but he also went for more than seven an over, and that is the arithmetic of a death-overs collapse that never quite happened. Basir Ahamad then hit 15 from four balls at the very end — two fours and a six — and turned 298 into 313.

Fifteen runs from four balls. In a match decided by 44, you can trace a line straight from that cameo to the trophy.

The UAE chase started fast and wrong. Tanish Suri made 42 from 28 and the opening stand was 45 from 30 balls, which is the exact tempo that feels wonderful for ten overs and ruinous for forty. Adeeb Usmani and Akshdeep Nath then went for six and nought, and at that point the chase needed someone to bat 40 overs.

Rahul Chopra batted 40 overs. His hundred took 105 balls and was almost entirely responsible — he put on 47 with Harpreet Singh, 87 in 98 balls with Sohaib Khan, and 53 in 43 with Khuzaima Tanveer, which is to say that every partnership of substance in the innings had him at one end of it. Sohaib Khan's 52 was the only other innings above 42.

Nepal's bowling deserves credit for refusing to be broken by it. Karan KC took 3 for 49, Lalit Rajbanshi went for 43 from his ten, and Sandeep Lamichhane — the Player of the Series — bowled his full allocation for 53 and a wicket on a day when the ball was coming on nicely. Nobody was cheap. But between them they kept taking wickets at the other end, and a chase in which one man scores 100 of your 269 is a chase you have already lost.

The Bayuemas Oval played as a good, true one-day surface — 582 runs across 99.1 overs, no seam movement of consequence after the first ten, and spin that turned slowly enough to be bowled through rather than around. The toss mattered less than it usually does at this venue. What it did reward was batting depth, and Nepal had it: their eighth and ninth wickets contributed meaningfully, while UAE's last four batters made 16 between them.

Sheikh's hundred was not a spectacular innings and that is why it worked. He came in early, batted through the first 35 overs of the innings, and did the unglamorous job of making sure Nepal never had to rebuild twice. Eight fours and four sixes across 106 balls is a strike rate of 96 — brisk without ever being reckless, and almost exactly the tempo a 313 requires.

He also kept wicket. In a final, in Malaysian September heat, batting 35 overs and then standing up behind the stumps for 49 more is a physical afternoon that the scorecard does not record.

This match did not have a CricIntel preview — the Premier Cup's knockout stage moved faster than our editorial calendar. We will have full analysis for Nepal's next assignment.

Worth noting for the record: Nepal lost to Hong Kong by 15 runs in the group stage on September 8 and were beaten by the same margin of jeopardy that ends most associate campaigns. They then won three straight knockout matches — Oman by 87, and now the UAE by 44 — which is the difference between a team that peaks and a team that holds.

Nepal leave Malaysia with the title, a captain in Rohit Paudel who is still only in his early twenties, an opener-keeper in Aasif Sheikh with a final hundred to his name, and Sandeep Lamichhane bowling well enough to be named the tournament's outstanding player. Gulsan Jha's 52 from 38 is the innings their selectors will look at hardest — a genuine finisher is the one thing associate sides almost never have.

For the UAE, this is a harder night than the scoreline suggests. They beat Oman by 49 and Hong Kong by seven wickets to reach the final, and they lost it with a batter carrying his bat for a hundred. Rahul Chopra at 105 balls for 100 was not the problem. The 169 runs the other ten made was.