What an edge of the seat, cliff hanger and thrilling match it was last night.
We did the fielding first. With our amazing bowling and fielding, we kept it tight, in fact, too tight and they were not able to take runs. The runs on their scoreboard were creeping up at snail’s pace. You could easily count the number of boundaries they scored, on the tips of your finger, that too, on one hand itself. Not only that, we also kept getting their wickets at short intervals. We started hoping that we can finish this game soon and play another friendly game after that as in the end, they were all out for 69 runs.
I’m sure most of you would have scrolled up to see if you read it right in the beginning that it was an edge of the seat, thriller etc. etc. match. 70 runs is easy peasy to achieve. Right? Well, that’s what we thought and hence took it too easy. We did not flinch when we were 0-1, 6-2, 9-3 and so on. It was not until we were around 30-5 that we started to notice the disturbing turn of events. And at around 50 for 7, alarm bells started ringing. As Adam rightly said at that point, it was time to steady the ship. But it was too late by then as the opposition were on a roll and very soon, we found ourselves at 60-9. It was only 8th over and we had 7 overs left. RRR was 1.43 per over (of 8 balls each), which is nothing. But it was looking like a herculean task for us at that time as we had no wickets left. If the opposition would have offered us a Draw at that point, we would have gladly accepted it. Kumar and Dom were at the crease. Every single run (when it was coming once in a blue moon) was cheered upon as it was taking us one agonising step closer to victory. We had stopped looking for scoring 70 and were counting how many more do we need to draw. We were desperately praying for opposition to help us by bowling extras so that we can have some runs to tick in the scorebook. But none of it was coming from their side. Every ball was too painful to watch. With every ball that missed the bat, we missed a heartbeat. And when that ball did not hit the stumps, we would breathe a sigh of relief. Slowly and (un)steadily, we kept on edging towards 70, sorry 69 (to draw), as that is what we were aiming for at that time. Then when we were at 65 runs, their bowler bowled a wide and a wave of relief swept over our team. It was a like a major milestone achieved, though not by our efforts. We were 67 now. It was then that Kumar ended our misery by hitting a boundary and relieving us from the suffering. Phew!
We were not ecstatic or jumping with joy at this victory. We were deep in thoughts, doing the introspection of how we brought ourselves in this situation.
Morale of the story:
In the game of cricket:
· never underestimate the situation
· never take it easy
· never let your guards down
· …..
(the list goes on and on as we are still introspecting)
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Amit Jha
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