Venturers Vs The Star, Thursday August 08th

Venturers 134-6 (20), The Star 138-4 (19.3)

This time, we simply lost. We didn’t bat badly, but we kept losing wickets. Nobody stayed in long enough to cut loose, except perhaps Siddhant, although Shreyas did hit a rare six. Krish, Kamal and Steve (the latter addressed as “Charlie” repeatedly by Siddhant, even after being corrected) all contributed 15. The last few overs didn’t add much. It added to 134, which we would usually consider defensible; but the Star have plenty of batting and there was a short boundary. Another tactical problem was that we had agreed to bowl ten overs consecutively from each end, to save time on a very gloomy late-summer evening. That worked, but it meant that bowlers had no choice of end.

We had one piece of luck early on when Ajay, who was playing against us for the second time in the week, was run out for no very good reason. He just tried a second on Kamal’s arm that was never there. He ran into Steve, who possibly didn’t have a very good reason for being where he was either, but by that time he was already out and he left without any complaint. We made no progress against Mark, though, whose accidental wounding of Dinesh a few weeks ago was never quite mentioned. Moreover, Harjeet wasn’t there so he was allowed to bat on to fifty, instead of being made to retire at some random score because Harjeet is bored watching him, as usually happens. Our ground fielding went to pieces: we let at least four shots go for four that should have yielded one at most. There was a left-hander with a powerful pull, and Gregory fed it: once a top edge resulted, but by this time we were past the midpoint so it went to the short boundary and cleared it easily. Gregory was very expensive and Imran was expensive by his standards. We dropped the left-hander three times; two fiercely hit pulls that Gregory got hands to, and one toe-end that Joji fumbled. Even so, as there was little threat from the other end, we still had a chance, particularly after Hirshith did catch the left-hander despite a collision with Kamal. They needed six off three overs. Kamal bowled five dots and a full toss that went for four; Joji five dots and a single; Gregory two dots…and then a slog, which went into a gap.