It was a nice sunny evening yesterday and everyone was looking forward to the last game of the season. Due to early sunset, it was decided to have reduced 12 x 8 balls overs.
We batted first and played with only 10 players but that wasn’t an issue at all for our amazing team. From the beginning itself, our batsmen were in attacking mode. In first over itself, we made 13 runs. It was a good start and we maintained this momentum throughout the game. Even though we kept losing wickets at regular intervals, we did not lose the pace of making runs. There was lot of misfielding by opposition and overthrows going to boundaries, which boosted out score even further. But this does not undermine excellent batting skills displayed yesterday by our batsmen. Till last batsman, we continued the momentum. One of our batsman retired at 30 and after 8 wickets down, he had to come back to add more score to our total. In the end, we amassed a massive total of 143 for 8 (remember, it was only 12 overs game). The target for the opposition was 144 in 12 overs, which meant that the required run rate was exactly 12 runs per over.
This massive target was a good morale booster for our team but our bowlers were not taking things lightly. In first over, we gave only 1 run, which threw the opposition off the track. They were way behind the RRR, something that they were not able to recover from. They tried to pick up the pace but the RRR kept on increasing with every over. In 5th over, we got our first wicket and then one more in that same over (both clean bowled). That slowed them down a bit for some time. At the end of 7th over, they were 54 for 2. RRR for them was 18 at that time. They got a bit aggressive after that and even though our fielding was good, they kept on finding gaps in between to score boundaries (I won’t use the excuse of being short of one player). We were not getting wickets but as long as their RRR was high, situation was under control. We got our 3rd wicket in 10th over. At the end of 11th over, they were 95 for 3, which meant that in the last over, they required 6 runs in every ball to draw; winning was out of equation for them (provided there were no extra balls). They were able to score only 8 runs in that over and at the end, they were 103 for 3. We won by a huge margin of 40 runs (once again, remember, it was only 12 overs game).
Well done to NOBs for winning yet another game and ending the season on a winning note. I think we lost only 2 (or was it 3?) games this season and won every other game. This was due to the excellent performance by each and every player in the NOBs team this season. Keep it up guys.
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