Josh Tongue bowled Will Smeed and Rehan Ahmed in successive deliveries to halt Birmingham Phoenix's pursuit of 188 against Manchester Originals in the men's Hundred on 26 July 2026. (BBC Sport)

The Hundred — cricket's 100-ball-per-side competition — compresses the sport into roughly two and a half hours of relentless, high-scoring action. Each team faces 100 deliveries (legal balls), and chases tend to accelerate quickly, so every wicket tilts the arithmetic sharply. Two wickets from two balls, as Tongue delivered here, can swing an entire match inside half a minute.

Birmingham Phoenix were chasing 188 to win — a stiff but not impossible target in a format designed for big hitting. (BBC Sport) Smeed fell first, beaten and bowled. Ahmed walked in next, only to suffer the identical fate off the very next delivery. Back-to-back wickets — two batters dismissed without scoring a run in between — are rare enough in any cricket format. In the Hundred, where momentum shifts can be brutal, they are doubly costly.

Jos Buttler had earlier set the platform for Manchester Originals with 90, a fluent, power-packed innings that pushed the target beyond comfortable reach. (BBC Sport) Buttler, one of England's most destructive white-ball batters, has long been a box-office draw in franchise cricket, and his ability to clear the boundary (hit the ball over the rope for four or six runs) makes him particularly suited to the format's demands.

The match also carried a subplot of ownership and identity. Manchester Originals are 70%-owned by RPSG Group, the Indian conglomerate that also runs IPL franchise Lucknow Super Giants, following the ECB's partial privatisation of the Hundred's eight teams. (ECB) Birmingham Phoenix's 49% stake sits with Knighthead Capital Management, the investment group behind Birmingham City Football Club — though the Phoenix operating company itself was sold to KHAL Boundary Six, LLC in July 2025. (ECB) (ECB Financial Statements) Moeen Ali, Birmingham's captain, has been a familiar face in the city's cricketing circles for years, and his return to lead the Phoenix was confirmed ahead of the 2026 season. (The Hundred, Facebook)

What makes Tongue's double strike memorable is the simplicity of it — no spectacular catch, no run-out chaos, just two fast, straight deliveries that beat two batters clean. In a format built for batters, it was a bowler's reminder that the game still belongs to anyone who can land the ball where it needs to go.