Seifert’s 72 off 38 wins the Hundred, and Goenka has a cricket trophy after ten years of trying

Tim Seifert hit the first ball of the chase through cover for four and the fourth over the leg side for six. Trent Rockets never got him under control after that. Manchester Super Giants needed 159 at Lord’s on Sunday night, got there with two balls unused, and won the men’s Hundred by five wickets.

Seifert’s 72 came off 38 balls with seven sixes in it, and it equals Will Jacks’ 72 off 41 for Oval Invincibles last year as the biggest score made in a Hundred final. His fifty took 23 balls, the fastest anyone has managed in a men’s final. He was player of the match and player of the tournament, the second on the back of 394 runs.

Noor Ahmad changed it in four balls

Buttler put the Rockets in and for 25 balls it looked like the wrong call. They were 33 for 0 at the end of the powerplay, Ben Duckett had already been dropped by Josh Tongue at short third man off Liam Dawson, and nothing about the evening suggested a bowler was about to take charge of it. Then Noor Ahmad came on.

Finn Allen belted his first ball straight to long-off and was gone for 15. Three deliveries later Duckett inside-edged onto his back pad, Buttler took the rebound behind the stumps, and the opener walked off for 31. Noor had taken five wickets across eight group games and Friday’s eliminator, a quiet tournament by his standards, and he saved 3 for 33 for the night it counted.

Aneurin Donald went after him anyway. He lap-swept his first ball for four and hit a six and a four when Noor bowled on. It was Donald who then called Sam Billings through for a single that was not there, and Dawson broke the stumps at the bowler’s end with the captain still short of the crease. Noor’s third came when Tim David edged a googly to Buttler without scoring, and Donald yorked himself charging Dawson for 38 off 19. Five wickets had gone for 47 in 32 balls.

Gregory dragged the Rockets back to 158

Lewis Gregory captained the Rockets to the 2022 title and has been at the franchise since it started, apart from a season at Manchester when they were still the Originals. He put on 46 in 25 balls with Mitchell Santner, hit consecutive boundaries off Noor and then three sixes into the leg side, and made 32 off 16 before dragging a Tongue slower ball to long-on. Santner finished 20 not out, Craig Overton found two late boundaries, and Sonny Baker took a wicket off each of the last two balls to leave the Rockets 158 for 8.

On most nights at Lord’s that is enough. Not on this one.

Sixty-six in 31 balls, then the wobble

Seifert and Paul Walter put on 66 in 31 balls, and it was the passage Buttler pointed to afterwards. “They went a long way to winning us the tournament,” the captain said of his openers. Walter had been drafted to the top of the order when Aiden Markram flew home for personal reasons, and he made 22 off 14 to finish the season with 247 runs from five innings at a strike rate near 180.

Seifert should have gone on 33. He hauled Craig Overton towards midwicket, Finn Allen tumbled over the rope and parried the ball back to Calvin Harrison, who caught it one-handed. TV umpire Martin Saggers decided Allen’s foot had brushed the boundary padding. Six runs instead of a wicket.

He traded sixes with Buttler, who made 23 off 14 with three of them, and was still in when the equation came down to 23 off 22. Then Mohammad Amir found a wide yorker, Seifert reached for it and edged behind, and Manchester set about complicating a game they had already won. Heinrich Klaasen picked out deep midwicket off Amir, Michael Bracewell was trapped lbw two balls later, and Dawson swung and missed twice at Ben Sanderson before clearing Donald at deep midwicket. Amir’s 3 for 29 were the best figures on the ground and they still lost.

Ten years of buying cricket teams, and this is the first one

Sanjiv Goenka’s RPSG Group bought 70 per cent of the Manchester franchise from Lancashire before this season and put its name on it. Goenka has been buying cricket teams since 2016, when Rising Pune Supergiant joined the IPL for two seasons, and he has run Lucknow Super Giants since 2022 and Durban’s Super Giants since the SA20 started in 2023. Seven IPL seasons and four SA20s had produced nothing. The closest any of them came was Pune losing the 2017 IPL final to Mumbai Indians by one run, and Durban losing the SA20 final in 2024. Sunday night at Lord’s is the first trophy he has won in cricket, and the first Hundred title a Manchester side has taken in either competition.

It cost Trent Rockets the double. Their women had beaten Sunrisers Leeds by eight wickets on the same ground four hours earlier, and both Rockets teams had topped their group tables, the first franchise to manage that in six seasons of the competition. No franchise has ever won both titles in the same year. That is still true this morning.

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