The Star Vs Venturers, Wednesday August 3rd

Star 179-5, Venturers 179-4

A tie! We haven’t had one of those for a while, and it seemed unlikely for most of the match that we would get that close, and unlikely in the last few balls that we wouldn’t win. We hadn’t bowled well, on the whole. The first two wickets fell to runouts, direct hits at the nonstriker’s end by George and by Yash. George’s was particularly impressive. Varun bowled reasonably well; Krish was a bit wayward; Gregory was all over the place. George did bowl quite well and picked up a wicket with a good yorker. A woman who clearly knew what to do with a cricket bat came out and started to do it, but she walked past one of Gregory’s few decent balls and Bhargab stumped her with the air of someone taking an unpleasant-tasting medicine. But there were plenty of good batters around, even though they had to obey the Star’s internal regulations and retire when their teammates got bored with them. We never stopped the flow until Varun’s last three balls, which produced nothing.

If we had reciprocated and retired Bhargab, there would have been no match. Anyway, it’s not clear how you do retired Bhargab if he doesn’t want to be retired. Krish kept him company for a long time but they didn’t ever get ahead of the run rate. Bruce has given Krish out LBW a couple of times this year and didn’t want to do it again, so Gregory umpired but it was the umpire they supplied who gave Krish out this time. He does play round his front pad sometimes. Yash did raise the scoring rate, and alarmed Bhargab with his running as usual, but he got bowled and Saad was also leg before immediately afterwards. It was left to George and Bhargab to get us nearly home. An expensive eighteenth over brought us into contention. At the beginning of the nineteenth, Bhargab reached a hundred and we attempted to retire him, but see above. Actually that might have been where we could have won it, because although Bhargab is very destructive he also values his wicket, so if you want somebody to crash a few off a good bowler as quickly as possible, you might do better with Varun, who was padded up. Early in the last over we got lucky, with four leg byes, and George ran a frantic single to get Bhargab back on strike with one needed. But the first ball he pushed into the ground to short leg. The second was widish outside off. Bhargab swished at it, missed, and looked hopefully at Bruce, who was umpiring by now. But we had agreed clear rules about wides at the outset: the umpires had discretion on the leg side, but the blue line was to be observed on the off side, and this was just inside it. So it came to the last ball: Bhargab jabbed it to square leg and ran; George ran also, but even though he is quick, square leg was quicker.

Nobody even mentioned a super over.