Binfield Cricket Club's 4th XI lost by 12 runs at home at Sol Joel Park on Saturday 22 August 2026, falling just short of Maidenhead Royals CC's 268 for 8 in a Thames Valley Cricket League (TVCL) Division 8B fixture despite a blazing 60 from 31 balls by Abinandan Venkatraman; Naresh Mani's 134 had earlier set the target, and a fine afternoon's cricket went the visitors' way by the width of a coat of paint.

Twelve runs. After eighty overs of cricket at Sol Joel Park on Saturday, twelve runs were all that separated Binfield's 4th XI from a memorable win - and for a heady half-hour in the middle of the chase it had looked as though they might pull off something better still. In the end Maidenhead Royals held on, but they were made to earn every yard of it.

Maidenhead had won the toss and batted, and for a while it was the Naresh Mani show. He and Sana Khan put on 121 for the first wicket, and Mani went on to a quite superb 134 from 106 balls - nineteen fours, three sixes, and the backbone of the entire innings. The remarkable thing is how hard Binfield fought back: from 121 without loss, Maidenhead lost 7 for 115, and it was Mani alone - seventh out, run out for 134 at 236 - who held the innings together, a brisk unbroken stand at the death nudging the total to 268 for 8. Binfield's Kali-Ann Docherty was the pick of the attack with 3 for 40, Abinandan Venkatraman chipped in with two, and 268, stiff as it was, felt like a reprieve.

Binfield's reply was a thing of two halves. Steve Jeffery anchored the top order with a patient 38 and Tim Vines struck a busy 45, but at 147 for 5 - Carter Daines and Vines both caught by Mani off Maidenhead's Abhishek Nair inside a couple of deliveries in the twenty-ninth over - the chase looked to have slipped away. Then came the passage that so nearly turned the match: Taran Kiri and Abinandan Venkatraman added 90 in a hurry for the sixth wicket, Venkatraman in particular playing an innings of glorious violence - 60 from 31 balls, six fours and four sixes, four-fifths of his runs in boundaries - that hauled the required rate back within touching distance.

It was Venkatraman's dismissal, caught for 60 with the score on 237, that ultimately settled it. Needing 32 from the last 17 balls with the field pushed back, Binfield could not find the boundary - the fortieth over, the last of any real hope, yielded only singles and twos - and they closed on 256 for 7, twelve short. If one wanted a single figure to explain a twelve-run defeat, it sat in the extras column: Binfield's bowling and fielding gave Maidenhead 27 extras - the runs a side hands over in wides, no-balls and byes - while Maidenhead's gave Binfield only 11. That swing of 16 runs was, on its own, larger than the margin of defeat.

There will be more comfortable afternoons than this, but few more absorbing. Taran Kiri finished unbeaten on 43, Naresh Mani took the honours with a superb hundred and a refusal to be shifted, and the 4th XI - second in Division 8B - can reflect that 256 in a losing cause is nothing to be ashamed of. So near, and yet.