IISc Cricket Updates

As the jinx continued, some of my team-mates started getting rather superstitious and even suspicious. Few of them suggested me to stop writing match reports just in case it might lead to a change in the team's fortunes. I relented but the jinx didn't. We lost one more league match and another was washed out. But finally, we won our last KSCA league encounter. Our overall league performance for the year 2009 looked like this: Played-5, Won-2, Lost-2, No Result-1. It's a replica of our performance in the previous edition of the league in 2008. And as was the case last year, we didn't have enough points to go through to the next round. To add salt to injury, the very team that we had thrashed convincingly in our last match, managed to sneak through to the super league stage. That's a different story though.

Things have been looking up since. Harsha had done a commendable job as the skipper for the past year. But as has been the norm, every year the conclusion of the league marks the appointment of a new captain and vice captain. Sounik and Shimjith have respectively taken up the mantle for the forthcoming season. They have both been the most consistent of batsmen for team IISc in the last few years.

A few positive changes have been wrung in. The most significant one being the appointment of a new coach for team IISc. Sridhar, the veteran from Sangam cricketers, and a long-time well-wisher of team IISc, has taken up that job since November 26. He's brought in some rigourous fitness and fielding drills in the net sessions apart from looking into fine-tuning some of the technical aspects of individual players. We have since won a couple of practice games and competed well in a couple that we lost. It looks like an upward curve. But how tangible the results are can only be gauged in about ten matches from now. Can we take our current success rate of 40% to something much higher?

The next major assignment for the team is the IIM-B Invitational Tournament in January 2010. Eight teams representing elite institutions/colleges across Bangalore are in the fray. All matches are 25-overs-a-side except the semi-finals and finals which will be 30-overs-a-side.

In case you wished to tune in to the tourney scores and updates, you know where to log in :)

For those who are within the IISc campus there are, of course, other ways of staying updated. I sign off with a quote from the letter we received from the organizers:

A "Tournament Anouncement Board" will be provided to each participating team, which will give scores of all matches in the tournament in brief. The participating teams are expected to keep this board in their campus at a location frequented by students, and update it with scores as provided by the Organizing Committee.