COLUMBUS CRICKET CLUB
CCC travelled to Dayton to play its first road game of the season vrs UC.
An overcast day and a dodgy pitch greeted CCC. CCC won the toss and elected to bat.
My thanks to Vineel for volunteering to travel with the team in the last minute.
Middle order batsmen (Kosike, Darbha) did not want to force themselves into the
opening slot and I agreed. Missing our regular openers, Vineel shouldered the responsibility of opening the innings with Hari Prashanth Sundaram.
Vineel went swinging after he was frustrated by lack of runs. We found out later that's how the entire game is going to be. In retrospect it was a very decent start.
Hari and Abhi were clearly the most technically equipped batsmen on that day. They played well before getting out at unexpected times. The bright spot is they went playing confidently - which is what you always would like to see.
Soon it was evident that the pitch was a little dodgy and UC bowlers (esp. Kaustabh) knew which spots to bowl. There were several spots on good length off which the ball shoots and keeps low.
I think the pitch suited Kosike and Ravi Darbha 's game - but they couldn’t stay on as they received two of the most unplayable balls of that day.
Sekhar provided good late order resistance. He helped us move to a respectable score along with the two left handers (Sandeep Deshpande and Eswar Sabapathy) - who incuded countless wides from the UC bowlers.
May be I missed a trick by not sending one of the them up the order and reaping the rewards (in the form of wides) :-)
Helped by 50 extras, we posted a score of 91 - which is, to put it honestly, Pathetic! :-)
CCC bowlers were buoyed by the fact that the pitch is playing tricks and we all were
determined to make a game out of it.
Sekhar and Amit started off bang on target, but strangely, the pitch stopped playing tricks on UC batsmen. In retrospect, I think it wasn’t a minefield or anything - just had some bad spots. Frankly, it was just a bad performance by our batsmen - period.
UC top order was resistant and they had the luxury of knowing that they had 35 overs and only 91 to get. After Vijay was caught by Darbha, Abhi immediately took another wicket (LBW) and that got us back into the game with a slim chance of winning. Kosike won another LBW shout next over to really get us all excited and scenting an improbable victory. UC 7 down for 84 - eight more needed with 3 wkts in hand.
But, in the end I guess we just did not scored enough and the UC batsmen just had to keep their cool to see it off.
1) Always keep your wickets in hand - never throw your wicket, regardless of your *perceived* notionabout how slow you are playing or how your teammates in the pavilion are cursing you :-)
If you are not able to rotate the strike by playing defensive shots, chances of your big heaves connecting is also pretty low.
2) Don’t over-extrapolate. If you got only 10 runs in the first 5 overs, that does not mean you will end up with only 70 off 35.
Bowlers cannot keep focus for all 35 overs and when they start slipping, batsmen should take over.
3) Which leads to: Always keep wickets in hand to score more runs when bowlers eventually lose focus.
UC bowlers lost rhythm & gave away 20+ runs when left-handers were batting with Sekhar. Unfortunately, we had only 2 wkts in hand at that time - so we could not take full advantage.
By Game Reporters
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Bharat Jataprolu
Abhijeet Deshpande
Ravi Mangipudi
reporters@columbuscricket.org