One helluva match

Me and my gang of thick school friends usually play cricket matches every summer vacation. The cricket ground always used to be the beach…

The beach has a small portion of tar road and then a good distance covered by sand....every inch of the road would be take up for some tournament or a friendly/ bet match…

The beach, because of the breeze aids in swing bowling….the ball would curve around like a snake...one had to be a bit careful while playing the ball. The keeper would be standing up to the stumps for pace bowlers.....and their hands were like the Reserve Bank....as safe as Hell!! Batsmen never used to play lofted shots because the swing in the air would not carry it over a long distance.It takes some practice to judge a catch in the beach.

The matches usually start by around 6:30 in the morning… this is because of the heat in the summer, and in the evenings by around 3 o clock…

This match, which I’ll be talking about, happened to take place on a cool day in Chennai, just one of those odd summer days…..

Sai, our team’s spinner wanted to play a friendly match with his area-friends….we decided on a 16- overs a side match

And we happened to get the center pitch on that day…..
The center pitch is a privileged piece of land on the tar road….happens to be on the center of the road and has equal boundaries on either side of the road as well…

Arvind, our team captain won the toss and elected to bat….our batting, though not very strong, contained an array of pinch hitters and few good batsmen. The batsmen being David, Jude, Kannan and Arvind….rest including me were tall men with strong hands.

We practiced swishing and flicking the bat…if the ball met the meat of the bat, it would go flying….else the stumps would go flying!!!

Our batsmen got off to a disastrous start…. We were tottering at 4 for the loss of 3 wickets in 5 overs…..after nudging and hanging around, we managed a meager total of 24 in 16 overs...but still managed to keep 1 wicket in hand!!!

We were all pissed off with our dismal show….and we wanted to redeem ourselves for the poor batting in some way.

I happened to be the opening bowler...I was willing to go all out to get a few early wickets…and Lady Luck didn’t disappoint.

My first ball happened to be a Yorker....the batsman couldn’t jam the bat down in time and the ball sneaked its way to the stump....I couldn’t hide my joy and went around jumping…..But, they still had nine wickets in hand!!!

Then, off the last ball of the over, I bowled a bouner....it got high on the batsman as he tried a lofted shot….and he was caught in the deep….score read 1 for the loss of 2 wickets in 1 over….

Then Arvind came on….he got two batsmen bowled in the next over….the score read 4 for the loss of 4 wickets..

A few overs went by but they still needed only 21 to win from 10 overs….Arvind decided to bring the fielders in and stop the singles….

Never did we know that they were really poor runners between the wickets…..two nervous run-outs happened…..and they were really in a spot of bother…
9 for the loss of 6 wickets in 7 overs….

I came back into the attack again and bowled a few bouncers, but to no avail…batsmen were happy to see me off…

A few more quick wickets and they were all out for 12 runs….we won the match by 12 runs!!!

Arvind, our captain, treated us all to a glass of Paneer Soda!!!
This is one match I’ll never forget my whole life…..
To this day, we still tease Sai as to why he chose to play a match with that team!!!