Winning streak comes to an end!

Aug 09, 2009 Vs TheOpposition

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After eight successive wins we lost today's game - Yikes!

We didn't bowl well and could have done a little better with the bat.

The Opposition (the team we played the semi-finals against in Div F) won the toss and elected to bat, this was a new ground (MS Ground #6) which we were not familiar with, it was an 8:15 am Sunday game, not sure what happened to our bowlers, we were pitching it short and wide and the batsmen capitalized on it and got off to a terrific start - just what they needed.

We gave aways 16 Extras and that says it all on how badly we bowled, it means 16 extra deliveries and 16 runs - bad, most of their batsmen chipped in with 10-15 runs and the rest were obviously extras, there were some brief moments of brilliance from a couple of our players one was from our one and and only Sumit - two terrific back-to-back deliveries both bowled and Adeel's (substituting for Amogh who probably fractured his little finger while fielding) spectacular dive to a quarter-chance catch. TheOpposition made 87 for 6 off 16 - Sumit and Nazeer took 2 wickets, Suhail took 1 and the other was a run out.

Faheed and I opened needing 88 to win, Faheed skied one to cover and was caught in the very first over, I started off well, I felt good since I was middling the ball early in the innings, the bowlers then began to settle in and bowled and a near perfect line, now I began to give them dot balls and our scoring rate was climbing, Nazeer on the other end was playing well not wasting too many deliveries and we ran singles and twos well, but we needed boundaries, our asking rate climbed to seven an over, I began to open my shoulders and was ready to go after the bowlers after a straight-six which I really didn't middle well to be honest and I was surprised that the bat that I was using still had that power to let the ball sail over the long-on boundary where the fielder caught it past the boundary line, soon after that Nazeer and I was caught in a bad-mix up and I was run out (yes, again) , Nazeer and I had a good 50+ run partnership, but soon Nazeer fell caught behind, Suhail and Sumit did well to get us close to the target, we required 13 runs off 10 balls and I still couldn't believe we lost it from there, 3-4 dot balls followed and Suhail was run out and Sumit skied one to long on and was caught. Last ball we required 6 runs to win and 5 runs to tie, Mushtaq almost did it with a straight lofted drive to long on but the fielder got it one bounce.

Good decent effort from TheOpposition and also we helped them out with our Extras and my inability to get runs quickly in the early part of the innings helped TheOpposition clinch victory.

On to Autobots next - 8/16 11:00 am.

GO SARFAROSH!