Saturday night turned out to be a dampner and forced us to cancel our Sunday's morning game. With Alfonso looking like a quicksand and triangle ground not in any better conditional, we were staring at a gameless Sunday. But as luck would turn out, we had our evening game at the triangle ground. There were sand in the good length area enough to build a home!! I think you get the point, the ball would bounce or keep low and it would be very hard to judge the ball as well as the pace of the wicket. wonder why we didn't play in our usual area, it looked deserted when I came in.
Our team: Mani, Vicky, Maddy, Raghav, Raghu, Sridhar, Jagan, Karthick, Ram and Sudarshan (only 1o this time)
Our opponents: Some local team
It was a 12 over match. Freddie is quickly turning out to be our lucky mascot as far as the toss is concerned. We won that and choose to bat as Mani came pretty late. We started off with Sudarshan and Freddie and the opening pair got us to a good start as we strolled to 36 in 6 overs, Freddie looking particularly good. As is the norm, once we start loosing wickets, we keep losing a bunch. When Sudarshan got run out without knowing where the ball was, Freddie soon perished trying to bludgeon the ball which was way too offside to where else but his favourite leg side and got caught out. Thats when the run dried down. Raghu's miserable spell with the bat continued as he got bowled. No one else came to terms with the slowness of the pitch and to make matters worse, the opponents weren't trying too hard to bowl and it looked like we didn't have any powerful hitters. A lot of deliveries were not connected by us and in the process we wasted too many deliveries. Sridhar too was unable to rapidly increase the score. Jagan's friend Karthick looked like a misfit for slow bouncy pitches like everyone else and he too misfired. Vicky stayed till the end running hard and even got a boundary that stretched the score to 59 off 12 overs. I kept Vicky company till the last over. You can imagine the way we lost the total plot after Freddie got out. We had two more wickets at the end, though Mani turned up only when we started to bowl.
We started off with Jagan and Sridhar for the opening spell and Jagan was impressive as he took a couple of wickets. Sridhar got one in his opening spell as the opponents were teeterring @ 16 for 4 in 4 overs. Mani then bolwed a wild 5th over but gave away not more than 6 runs. Vicky was taken apart for 14 in his first and only over as somehow they started adapting to the wicket well. Since we were only defending a paltry score, they were never under any sort of pressure for runs. So even after the initial hickup, they started flourishing. Raghu and Mani bowled 3 overs each, whereas Jagan only bowled two. I thought it was one over too many for Raghu, probably trying to make amends for his batting. He could have let Jagan bowl another over or looking at the wicket even I could have had a dig, not saying I am better bolwer than Raghu just could be a better option at this wicket. But at the end, no one really wanted to take any risk with me. Alas, we lost the match too. But it was already lost after the first 12 overs. Only we had a brief lifeline during their start of the innings but it wouldn't last.
It seems like our mind is set to one way of batting that we simply couldn't adapt. Either you need to be powerful enough like Freddie to not care about the wicket or sensible enough to pick the gaps and increase the score. We had one look at their bowling and we said to oourselves that we could hit basically everything outta the ground, which didn't turn out to be true.
We tried a 6 over game as an afterthought and we miserably failed in batting again. Raghu was again take to the cleaners though Ram hit a boundary I think. But we couldn't complete the match as the ground was taken over by football lovers.
Do not be hasty or underestimate the opponents or the pitch.
Cheers,
Madhavan
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