Five runs: TB Bengal Tigers vs Mustangs

March 21, 2026 · League

Some wins feel clinical. Others feel like you earned every run. The five-run win over Mustangs on March 21 was firmly in the second category.

We posted 128/7 in 16 overs. They chased hard, pushed all the way to 123/10. The margin looks comfortable on paper. It did not feel that way in the middle.

A day where the bat did most of the talking early, and the ball quietly finished the conversation.

The match in one line

TB Bengal Tigers set 128/7 in 16 overs. Mustangs fell five runs short, bowled out for 123 in the same allocation.

With the bat

I won’t pretend this was anything other than one of those innings where everything clicked. 68 off 34 balls — nine fours, four sixes, a strike rate of 200.00. The ball was finding gaps, the boundaries were coming in rhythm, and for a stretch in the middle it felt like the game was ours to shape.

The platform mattered. The team around it mattered. But I’ll keep this one.

Batter	R	B	4s	6s	SR
Nafi C M	68	34	9	4	200.00
Khaled Sadim	14	17	2	0	82.35
Saif Uddin	19	17	0	1	111.76
Birat Saha	3	4	0	0	75.00 (not out)

With the ball

If the bat was the story in the first half, Birat Saha was the story in the second.

Mustangs came out swinging. Adhithya Guntupalli (37) and Mounik Velagapudi (24) put on a stand that gave the chase real momentum. Birat broke it. Then he broke it again. Three wickets — the openers, then Ankith Yeru when the middle order was trying to rebuild — and each one came at a moment when Mustangs needed a boundary, not a dismissal. He kept the chase honest when it had every reason to run away from us.

I chipped in where I could. A run-out on Sai Akshith Thodupunuri — their captain, going at over 160 strike rate — was the kind of moment that shifts a game quietly. No big celebration, just the right result at the right time. I bowled my overs without doing damage to the cause either, which on a day where the target was already modest felt like the right job to do.

Sayem Hossain cleaned up the tail efficiently to seal it.

Why the game stays with me

There’s a version of this match where the batting looked good and the rest was noise. This wasn’t that. Birat’s spell in the middle overs was what kept five runs a reasonable margin instead of a footnote to a comfortable chase.

The innings I played felt good in the moment. But the bowling held something together that the bat alone couldn’t have protected. That kind of balance — where different people contribute at exactly the right time — is what makes a team win feel different from an individual highlight reel.

This one belongs to both.