From my childhood days, I was very fascinated about sports, especially cricket. I used to watch all the cricket matches, whether test or one-day. I mostly played cricket with my elder brother. After getting admission to IIIT, I found that there wasn’t a very good ground for playing cricket. I was very disappointed. Despite of this, we played cricket very often, sometimes in our college ground and sometimes in other grounds in the vicinity.
Last year in winter, my colleague RIT2007049 told us about a cricket tournament that was going to be organized 3-4 kms away from campus. In the beginning, nobody was ready to play in the tournament because of the cold weather. Anyway, I finally managed to convince a team of 11 players + our coach Santosh Kumar to play in the tournament, including two juniors, Nitish and Bajiya. Other players were Alok, Mayank, Pervinder, Rahul, Nishchal, Vishal and Sachin.
With high hopes and expectations, we went to play the first match. On reaching the ground where the tournament was to be organized, we found a good crowd and the arrangements were far more than what we had expected. Everyone was excited about the tournament. Being the captain of the team, I went for toss with our opposition captain. I lost the toss :( and we were told to field. I told my team that we had won the toss and I chose to field :P. Nobody except a few members knew the truth.
Then began the most difficult match in the tournament for us. The commentary during the match was wonderful. Our players got new names during that match. Alok became Salman, Pervinder became Harbhajan, Rahul became Dravid and so on. The opposition set us a high total (One thing that I remember about their innings was the dropped catch by Harbhajan) that we chased with extreme difficulty facing the collapse of our top order. We were helped by the innings of Sandeep and someone (I don’t remember his name. I’ll update soon). Excited with the first victory, we went back to our college and described about the wonderful atmosphere to everyone. Others who had earlier said NO for the game felt dejected about their decision. After hearing about the first match, Sandeep and Gandhi couldn’t stop themselves from joining the team for the upcoming matches.
The organizing committee was very helpful and scheduled the matches according to our timings. The next two matches were easy for us and we managed to win comfortably. The semifinals and finals were scheduled to be on the same day. Semifinal was the first match in the tournament for us where we got to bat first. Rahul and Nishchal got us to a good score and good fielding and excellent bowling from Sachin and Bajiya helped us win the game and reach the finals.
We had a great support from our batch-mates: Deepak, Hemendra, Indrajeet, Naresh, Rajeev, Raghu, Varun, Sunil and Shashank, who had come a long way to support us. We again got the opportunity to bat first. We all were energetic and excited to win. Unfortunately, our beginning wasn’t upto the expectations. Rahul was holding wicket from one end. But we lost wickets from the other end at regular intervals. Towards the end of the innings, me and Mayank accelerated the scoring and got our team to a respectable total. Again in the bowling department, Sachin broke through the opposition and took a fantastic hattrick. At the end, a tailender tried to bring them back into the game but it was too late. We had finally won the tournament. :D :D :D Great team work. And we were individually given prizes. And as usual, the photo session began. Check out the pics here.