Ninety-Three Not Out at One End, Nine Wickets at the Other: Hamza Khan Carries Rwanda Home by Six

There is a particular loneliness to carrying your bat in a Twenty20 innings. You watch nine partners come and go, you are told after every second one that the innings needs rebuilding and accelerating simultaneously, and at the end you walk off with a not-out score that nobody quite knows how to categorise.

Hamza Khan made 93 from 48 balls at the Gahanga B Ground on Sunday evening and was unbeaten when Rwanda's twentieth over ended on 183 for 9. Seven fours, seven sixes, and — this is the number that matters — more than half of his side's runs from the bat. Six runs was the eventual margin. Take twenty off Hamza's score and Botswana win comfortably.

Botswana will look at this scorecard for a while and keep landing on the same line. K Piet: four overs, one maiden, seven runs, two wickets. In a Twenty20 innings that produced 183, one bowler conceded 1.75 an over across a full spell. That is one of the most remarkable analyses you will see in this tournament, and it came in a defeat.

The reason is at the other end. Mooketsi's four overs cost 47, Tshose's cost 46, Mpatane's 34. Rwanda scored 176 from the sixteen overs Piet did not bowl. When one bowler is unplayable, a batter of Hamza Khan's quality simply waits him out and takes the other four apart, and Rwanda's innings is a case study in exactly that.

Rwanda were 124 for 7 in the seventeenth over and looked to be heading for 150. Hamza and JM Iradukunda added 35 for the eighth wicket in a hurry, and 59 came from the last three and a half overs. Twenty-one extras did not help Botswana either.

Botswana's reply was cut to sixteen overs with a revised target of 153 — a slightly steeper ask per ball than the original, which is what DLS does to a side chasing when overs are removed and wickets are not.

They started well. V Mbazo and V Balakrishnan put on 61 for the first wicket in 7.2 overs, and when M Kasselman arrived he played the innings of the chase: 57 from 32 balls with five sixes. At 126 for 5 at the end of the fourteenth, Botswana needed 27 from twelve balls with Kasselman still there.

He fell at 145 with five balls of the sixteenth over gone, and with him went the match. Botswana needed eight from the final delivery and got one. Muhammad Nadir and E Rukiriza took two wickets apiece; between them they bowled seven overs for 47 in a chase where every other Rwandan bowler went at better than eight.

The Gahanga B Ground had already held Sierra Leone to 112 for 9 earlier in the day; by the evening it was producing 329 runs in 36 overs. The difference was partly the pitch drying out and partly the quality of the batting — Hamza Khan and Kasselman between them scored 150 of those runs. Botswana's innings was reduced to sixteen overs with the revised target set before they began, so the chasing side knew exactly what it needed from the first ball.

No CricIntel preview was published for this fixture, so there is no call to grade. The observation worth recording for next time is the one Botswana's own captain will be making: a side that produces a spell of 4-1-7-2 and still concedes 183 has a bowling-allocation problem, not a bowling problem.

Rwanda move to six points from five matches, level with Uganda, who have played one fewer, and behind an unbeaten Kenya on ten. Botswana are on two points from five with one win. The hosts have now won three of five, and this was the tightest of them by some distance.

The individual story is simpler. Hamza Khan has just played the innings of the tournament, and Rwanda's dependence on him is now the most obvious thing about their batting. The other ten batters made 69 between them on Sunday.