Thirty-Seven for Three, Two Balls to Spare — Bilal Tahir's Unbeaten Hundred Beats Oman and Blows Group B Open

Kuwait have spent this tournament being the side other people beat convincingly or lose to convincingly. They put 160 past Singapore on DLS and were then taken apart by the UAE by 66. Nobody had seen them do the hard thing — win a close one, chasing, against a good side, with the game slipping.

They were 37 for 3 in the ninth over here, chasing 253, with their wicketkeeper stumped for a duck and both openers gone. Then Bilal Tahir walked out at 72 for 4 in the eighteenth over and did not come back until it was finished, 106 balls and 103 runs later, with two deliveries left in the match.

Oman had been the best side in Group B. They still might be. But this is the sort of defeat that reshapes a group, and it was authored almost entirely by one man batting for two and a half hours in Kuala Lumpur heat with no margin for a mistake.

Seven Omani batters reached 19 and one of them reached 53. That is the whole innings in a sentence. Hasnain Ul Wahab and Jatinder Singh gave them 34 in six overs; Karan Sonavale played the best strokes of the morning for 43 from 40; Hammad Mirza took 50 deliveries over 22, which on a surface this good is a genuine cost.

Jiten Ramanandi's 53 from 55 was the innings that held it together, arriving at 100 for 4 in the twenty-first over and lasting until 195 for 7 in the forty-first. Vinayak Shukla, the captain and keeper, made 19 from 21 with two sixes and was caught off Abdullah Zaheer at 165 for 6.

The most interesting decision of the innings came at 245 in the fiftieth over, when Jay Odedra was retired out on 39 from 58 balls. It is an increasingly common piece of ODI thinking and it is almost always correct — a set batter scoring at two-thirds of a run a ball in the last over is worth less than a fresh one — and Shah Faisal duly hit a six off three balls to finish with 6 not out. It bought Oman seven runs off the last four balls. They lost by four wickets with two balls to spare.

Kuwait's bowling was better than 252 suggests. Mohamed Shafeeq and Abdullah Zaheer took three each; the captain Mohammed Aslam bowled ten overs for 33 with three maidens; Yasin Patel's ten went for 33 without a wicket. Four bowlers sent down forty overs for 176. The remaining ten cost 75, and Muhammad Aqif Farooq's four went for 39.

And behind the stumps, Meet Bhavsar took five catches. Five. He also made nought from three balls and was stumped, which is a hard day to summarise.

Kuwait's chase began badly and got worse: 22 for 1 in the seventh, 36 for 2 and 37 for 3 in the space of two deliveries in the ninth as Jay Odedra had Ravija Sandaruwan caught and Meet Bhavsar stumped. Ali Zaheer then took 23 balls over nine and was caught off Nadeem Khan. Seventy-two for four in the eighteenth over, chasing 253, with 32 overs left and a required rate climbing past five and a half.

What Bilal Tahir did from there was not spectacular and that is precisely the point. He and Mohammed Aslam added 89 for the fifth wicket, taking Kuwait to 161 by the thirty-sixth over — a partnership built at a shade under five an over, refusing both to panic and to settle. Aslam's 62 from 77 was the innings of a captain who understood that the chase needed a base more than it needed a burst; he was bowled by Shakeel Ahmed with the job half done.

Then Bilal and Yasin Patel added 88 for the sixth, and this was where the match was won. Ninety-two needed from fourteen overs became four needed from eight balls, and at no stage did Bilal take the risk that Oman were waiting for. He hit nine fours and three sixes across 106 deliveries — a strike rate of 97 in a chase that required 5.06 an over from the first ball. He reached his hundred and was still there at the end, unbeaten on 103.

Yasin Patel's 37 from 38 was the perfect foil and his dismissal — caught by Karan Sonavale off Shah Faisal at 249 for 6 in the forty-ninth — gave Oman a last flicker. Nimish Lathief came in and hit a four, and Kuwait were home with two deliveries unused.

Oman did nothing disgraceful. They took four wickets in the first eighteen overs, their two frontline seamers — Shah Faisal 2 for 37 from eight, Jay Odedra 2 for 41 from ten — bowled well, and Nadeem Khan's nine overs cost 43 with a maiden.

The problem was the middle. Karan Sonavale's 9.4 overs of part-time bowling cost 53, Shakeel Ahmed's ten cost 58, and between overs 18 and 44 Bilal Tahir and his partners were rarely made to play a delivery they did not want to. Oman's frontline attack is three bowlers deep; against a batter prepared to bat fifty overs, three is not enough.

The second thing is the total. Two hundred and fifty-two on the Bayuemas Oval is a par score and Oman had 100 for 4 in the twenty-first over and 195 for 7 in the forty-first. They needed a hundred from someone and got seven starts instead. On a ground where Kuwait have now made 256 chasing, par was not enough.

The Bayuemas Oval played entirely true — 508 runs for fourteen wickets across just under a hundred overs, with the ball coming on at a consistent height and neither side finding meaningful movement. The only real assistance was for the slower bowlers in the middle overs, and even that was grip rather than turn: Mohammed Aslam's three maidens in ten overs were earned by accuracy, not by the pitch.

Oman batted first, which was the right call on a surface that was never going to deteriorate, and their scoring rate — 5.04 an over — was almost exactly what Kuwait went on to achieve. This was a straight contest between two batting line-ups on equal terms. One of them had a batter who made a hundred.

This match didn't have a CricIntel preview — we'll have full analysis for the next Oman and Kuwait fixtures. The read we carried into it, after Oman's 131-run win over Singapore and their five-wicket win over Qatar, was that their bowling depth was the group's best asset. That held for eighteen overs and then failed for thirty-two, and the failure was structural: two seamers and a spinner is a fine attack until the game requires a fourth option to take a wicket rather than contain. We had also written Kuwait off as an inconsistent side after the UAE beat them by 66. That was too quick.

Group B is now a genuine mess. The UAE lead on four points from two games. Oman have four from three. Kuwait have four from three. Qatar have two from three and Singapore none from three. Kuwait play Qatar next; Oman play the UAE, which is now effectively a knockout for the group.

Kuwait have found a top-order batter who can bat fifty overs, which changes what they are capable of. Bilal Tahir's 103 not out is the sort of innings that a side builds a tournament around, and Mohammed Aslam's contribution — 62 with the bat, 10-3-33-1 with the ball — was the most complete all-round captain's performance of the round.

Oman will not panic. They are 2-1, level on points at the top, and the UAE game is winnable. But they need a batter to go past fifty and make it a hundred, and they need a fourth bowler. Both problems were on display in one morning.