Evergreens Vs Venturers, Sunday May 22th

Evergreens 72, Venturers 73-7

It is probably fair to say that Tilakraj is not obviously a danger man in the field. He is not of strikingly athletic appearance, or aggressive demeanour. It was probably this that caused Amir, one of Evergreens’ two best batters, to assume that his cover drive would pass him, and start running; and Rash, the other good batter, set off at a brisk lollop with no sense of danger. Tilakraj stopped the ball cleanly and whipped a throw back to Bhargab. It was neither very fast nor very accurate, but it was good enough and Rash was left stranded. A few balls later Amir played the cover drive again, lofting it this time. By now he should not have been surprised that Tilakraj snaffled it. Maybe Tilakraj’s catch in the first match of the season wasn’t as much a matter of luck as he said it was. Krish, Saad and Sanay removed the next three for ducks. From 25-5 there was a bit of a recovery: slow at Gregory’s end, rather brisker at Sanay’s because of a spate of wides. But they Sanay clipped the top of the stumps when the batter was perhaps trying to leave, and Aakshar and Gregory abruptly broke the tail off, helped by another catch by Tilakraj.

So it was left to us to mess up. We did it by trying to give everybody an innings, even if they had had a bowl (Gregory and Bruce of course refused). Krish played round his front pad. Jaideep and Varun progressed very slowly, gradually creating pressure on themselves. Eventually Varun got out. That should have been time to send Bhargab in, but Tilakraj was sent out to get a duck first. Bhargab and Jaideep ground on to 50-odd, but then Jaideep got out and suddenly we could see a way to lose. Saad showed some sense of urgency, but then he ran himself out. At this point, Simon ought to have batted, but instead he sent first Sanay and then Aakshar, neither of whom did anything. By this time Bhargab was getting panicky, because he knew that Bruce and Gregory can’t bat and he had to assume that Simon, whom he hadn’t seen, was worse than Sanay and Aakshar. After a few minutes he realised, with relief and some confusion, that this was not the case, and trusted Simon to keep the bowling out. Fortunately Simon did do that, otherwise we would after all have been relying on Bruce and Gregory, and Bhargab saw us slowly home. If Bhargab, Saad and Simon had batted at 3, 4 and 5 we would have won by seven wickets about an hour earlier than we did.