Day 138 - 24th November 2010

The MCL is heating up and all the action is spilling over off the field as well. So today's game was between Navy 'Square' Cuts and Lucky Strikes (who are incidentally the defending champions). It was expected to be a cakewalk for the strikes, but as they say this is a game of glorious uncertainties and we got to know today why it is so true! Strikes batted first and posted a competitive total of 98 on the board. Their mainstay in the batting order was given a life and he made the most of it in a partnership with a Wasim Jaffer clone. Though after he got out wickets started falling at regular intervals and the SQ's also raised the bar when it came to their ground fielding with some really good catches and ground fielding. On this ground anything above 80 gives the bowlers something to bowl at and with the kind of bowling attack the strikes had one knew it wasn't going to be an easy task. After losing Ravi early, it was upto Vineeth and Vikesh to steady the innings. The two roommates gave a brilliant exhibition of sensible batting, something that is rarely seen in the MCL. They hardly hit any boundaries but were always alert to steal singles and twos and even capitalise on overthrows (there were quite a few). The way they played out the strike bowlers of the strikes(pun intended) was a delight to watch, there were hardly any false shots played. Before the strikes could realise it SQ's motored along at a rate that was very close to the required rate. The two V's had laid a brilliant foundation for the rest of the team to launch the final assault. They even played out 5 of the 8 overs to be bowled by Beedi and Puri, the strike bowlers mentioned earlier. At around the 14th over a mini collapse of sorts took place with 4 wickets falling in quick succession, however Utkarsh brought the game back into balance by belting 2 consecutive boundaries before getting out trying to go for the third one. It was now down to Akshay Menon, popularly known as Baby Menon, since he just turned 21 and also because the other Menon in the batch is as old as father time ;-) So a little background is required here, Akshay was not able to score in the previous 2 matches and one of his innings lasted 15 deliveries without scoring a run. This made him the butt of a lot of jokes from the seniors but today he proved to them (and us) that he definitely isn't a baby and showed tremendous maturity in the final overs of the chase. He got into the groove by clubbing a couple of boundaries and keeping the required rate at a run a ball. The most crucial over though was the penultimate one with 12 runs required of 12 deliveries. Akshay whacked the first legal delivery of the over all the way to Bopal and with the first ball being a no ball only 5 runs were required of 11 balls. This is where he maintained his composure and showed great temperament, the next 5 deliveries were good ones and played all of them on merit. The strikes tried their level best to get under his skin with their trademark sledging but that hardly flustered him. With Dhruv taking a single early in the last over it was befitting that Baby Menon hit the winning runs which sent all the pgp1 students gathered at the ground into a frenzy! It was a clinical performance by the SQ's. The strikes were good in certain phases of the game with Kanabar taking 2 good catches on the off side, but apart from that they will rue the overthrows that they gifted the SQ's. At the end of the day the better team won.

Now generally at the end of such an exciting match if you were to choose one man who made an indelible impact on the game, the last person you would think of is the umpire! But such is the beauty of the MCL that today's man of the match had to be Satyaprem. He has always received a lot of flak from the seniors for no reason and has taken it in his stride. But today an altogether new level was reached when the strikes used all possible pressure tactics to make him crack but SP stood his ground. There were a couple of straightforward decisions that he made which were made to look controversial by the strikes and they used that as an excuse to converge on him as a mob, with stumps being wielded a weapon of mass destruction :P Unfortunately such tactics to disturb the concentration of the batsmen and the umpires hardly work, it only makes the bowling team look quite silly. Due credit must be given to people from pgp1 who supported Satyaprem in full force. Generally in such cases there is a tacit understanding between both teams that whatever happens on the field remains on the field. However that rule was broken when one of the strikes, wrote a pretty disgusting note about Satyaprem on facebook, with morphed images and all. Now until sometime back I respected for the guy for his knowledge on cricket and his writing skills, after reading the garbage he wrote that too on a public forum about a person from his own college I was quite saddened. Also the person in question was not even directly affected by Satyaprem's decisions because he was bowled of the first ball anyway :-D It got worse with him showing absolutely no remorse for what he had done and some other pgp2 guys actually supporting him on facebook. The replies to his note, especially to girls who requested him to remove the post,were quite disgusting! Anyways we as a batch have decided not to react because then we would have to stoop to the levels that they have gone to.

Nonetheless quite an eventful day, out of all this pgp1 got its first real rockstar - Satyaprem. As ironical as it may sound, he owes it all to pgp2 and their 'official blogger' ;-)