Saturday, February 6, 2010

Swastic teach IISc a lesson in cricket

5th Februrary, 2010, Indian Air Force Ground, Bangalore: Sometimes you play sport not to win or lose, but to learn. Friday provided one such occasion for team IISc when they played Swastic Union Cricket Club, the defending champions of the YSR Trophy. With little, if any, prior experience of playing on a turf wicket, and facing a challenging bowling attack, IISc was skittled out for 115. The most telling blows were inflicted by Akshay who dislodged Ganapathy and Ashith in his very first over and then came back later on to cut short Sunil's hard-hitting innings. There were flashes of brilliance shown by some of the IISc batsmen, most notably Vikram, Sunil and Sounik. The most entertaining moments of the match were when some of the Swastic fielders started doing a set of push-ups, rather ritualistically, each time any of their bowlers was hit for a boundary or a six.

Swastic's chase was professional and efficient on expected lines. Manjunath in particular played some cracking strokes to all parts of the ground on his way to a fluent unbeaten half century.

It's now time for team IISc to take a well deserved break after a long and gruelling season of non-stop cricket - a period when they took their cricket a notch higher. To summarize the performances in this season, IISc just missed the bus to the super-league stage of the KSCA IV Division league, reached the semifinals of the IIMB Invitational Tournament and reached the third round of the YSR Trophy. The team's record (excluding practice matches) starting from August 2009 up until today reads like this: Played-12, Won-7, Lost-4, No Result-1. Under Sounik's captaincy, the corresponding figures are 7-5-2-0.

Brief scores:
IISc - 115 allout in 33.4 overs
(Sunil 37, Vikram 28, Sounik 26*, Akshay 3/15, Udit Patel 3/21, Raju Bhatkal 2/12, Chetan William 1/18, Vinu Prasad 1/22)
Swastic Union CC - 116/1 in ~16 overs
(Manjunath 55*, Yuvraj 36, Ravi Teja 1/51)

Result: Swastic Union CC won by 9 wickets
Man-of-the-match: Akshay

Newspaper reports:

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