After a tight exciting semi final game vs the University of Pennsylvania team, the George Mason University cricket team took on their rivals, 2009 national Champions Montgomery College for the Chanderpaul Trophy.
George Mason University poses with championship trophy and American College Cricket president Lloyd Jodah. Photo courtesy of American College Cricket
UPenn went undefeated and made it to the Semi Finals, where they faced the vaunted George Mason batting which had scored over 200 runs twice before. Mason defeated UPenn to get to the Finals where they hoped Montgomery would emerge from the other Semi Finals, and so they did, defeating tough Auburn in another thriller.
In the Finals of the 2011 American College Cricket Spring Break Championship on a tough pitch to score runs the George Mason guys won the toss, and batted first in strategic move. As their captain Hashim Khan later said, “It’s difficult to chase runs on this pitch so we knew if we batted first and put up 150 runs, we would have a great chance of winning.”
The George Mason team did not quite manage that total but got to 138, a score that the Montgomery batsmen knew would be tough, but was well within range.
However Montgomery lost a couple of early wickets and once again America’s most well-known cricketer Adil Bhatti was called upon to do his heroics, but despite his well played 55 the Montgomery team’s effort ran out of gas and their 20 overs ended with the score on 124.
Most of the Universities’ teams have been started by Lloyd Jodah over the past 2 years and the George Mason University team is no exception. Hashim Khan and Jodah began the Mason team just prior to the 2010 American College Cricket Championship. Not quite established as a formal club the team’s winning of the national Championship is being celebrated by the University and its media. Hashim sees some major steps for cricket being taken on campus now that Mason is the national champions, such as allocation of a cricket field.