Official Story by Sunkara, Sudhir Kumar, Senior Engineer Qualcomm HYD

The beauty of sport lies in its unpredictability and the challenge of

sport lies in rising up to the situation. And this is what one

witnessed in our match with IBM on saturday.

IBM won the toss and chose to bat. Our captain Satyam Borah and

strike bowler Shiva were not available for the match. Rajasekhar

Gandhi captained the team for this match.

And the situation was totally not favorable to the "new" new ball

pair of Shubendra and Nickle... well, the bashing was a little too

harsh on us too. IBM went upto 80 runs in 4 overs! A bowling change

did the trick - well not exactly the bowling change, but a nice run

out by the wicket keeper Santhana alias Sandy ;-), ensured that we

get the first breakthrough.

The next over saw a wonderful catch being taken by Chandra. Running

all the way from long on to mid on, he pulled off what many would

have dismissed as something impossible. And the very next ball, Sandy

stumped their 3rd batsmen. Gandhi was bowler. Gandhi soon took their

4th wicket and IBM was suddenly reeling at 90-4. Talk about

unpredictability in sport!

The next bowling pair of Chandra and Vaidya were just not satisfied

with maintaining the tempo, so they upped it!! Chandra took 2 wickets

for 12 runs in 4 overs, and Vaidya took 3 wickets 16 runs in his 4

overs. A catch by Rajeev ended the IBM innings in 16.4 overs at 132 runs!

Special mention has to be made about our fielding here. The agility

of the players clearly helped in controlling the scoring rate all

through the innings. Brilliant catches by Chandra, Sumit and Gandhi

surely inspired the others to live up to the high standards thus set.

Catches, after all, do win matches :-)

Our opening batsmen Vaidya was in no mood to wait for a long time to

complete the match. His 48 runs came in 25 balls and this included

four 6's too. And ohh btw, twice the ball was lost outside the

stadium! By the time he got out, we were comfortably placed at 75 for

1 in 8 overs. And then a small mid-order collapse of 4 more wickets

did create tension though.

With 6 overs left and about 35 runs required. Shubendra Singh and

Gandhi steadied the innings. When Gandhi eventually got out, we

needed 12 runs off 9 balls. And the last over required us to score 7

runs. Sandy and Shubendra completed the job with 3 balls left! The

challenge of beating IBM was thus accomplished in a thriller!

Surely, the entire match was a totally perfect team effort, with the

captain truly leading from the front and all players complimenting

each other superbly. To beat a big team like IBM is no mean

achievement, and to accomplish this without some key players just

makes the achievement more worthwhile :-) Kudos to the team, and good

luck for the future!