It was a beautiful day for cricket at the Hecksher Cricket Ground as Victory Cricket Club (VCC) hosted Phantoms Cricket Club and looking for their second win of the season. Victory won the toss and elected to bat, no doubt wanting to put up a strong total. Rohit Kwatra and Harleen Singh opened the batting, riding on some good form from the previous week’s game.
Nevertheless, both openers would fall quickly to mistimed shots. The pitch at Hecksher is a true one and Victory CC has not been used to this, as they have been playing at a much slower Brentwood pitch.
With the score reading 25 for 2, newcomer Swapnil Sheth and veteran Navjot Singh tried to bring stability to the innings and held their ground for the next few overs. Navjot was then given a poor LBW dismissal with the ball hitting his upper thigh and appearing to be sailing over the stumps. Unfortunately umpire Brown thought otherwise and had Navjot on his way. The next few batsmen for Victory fell cheaply except for Swapnil (35 from 50 balls) and Shaunak Patel (16 from 6 deliveries). In the end VCC recorded a below par score, but a defendable 149 on a Hecksher pitch.
Phantoms openers started in a similar fashion to their counterparts with their openers dismissed early by some brilliant bowling from Darshan Raval and Sudeep Kanwal. Both bowlers kept a tight line and had the Phantoms batsmen on the back foot throughout their spells.
Darshan would finish with figures of 1 for 19 off 8 overs. The first 14 overs between the two bowlers yielded only 32 runs and two wickets. The bowling was the turned over to Harleen Singh and Navjot Singh. Harleen started with a caught and bowl scalp in his very first over, while Navjot with his brilliant off-breaks kept the pressure on from the other end. The Phantom CC batsmen seemed to be searching for runs. They knew that they were chasing a low score and with Ali Raza sticking in there for Phantoms, they seemed to be confident of getting to the required total for victory, however, kept taking wickets from the other end and after about 20 overs Phantoms score sheet read 62/5 wickets. Sensing that they needed a little bit acceleration, Burhan slogged out a Harleen over for 15 runs. However, he too perished with a beautiful in-swinging ball from Harleen that would uproot his off stump.
Meanwhile Navjot on the other end picked up Ali Raza who was batting beautifully until he hit a full-toss straight to the cover fieldsman. Harleen finished with 4/38 from 8 overs and Navjot with 1/29 of his 8 overs.
At 105/7 when it seemed like Victory would take it easily from there, Imran Baig and Shakeel Hamdani had other plans. Both of them kept rotating the strike and suddenly Phantoms had only 30 to get with 3 wickets in hand. Rohit Kwatra who was itching to bowl from the very first over finally came into the attack, and in his third ball of the spell bowled a spectacular yorker to Imran, and broke the dangerous looking partnership. Sudeep Kanwal was also brought back into the attack and cleaned up the tail with two successive wickets, sealing a 21-run win for Victory CC. He finished with 3/21 from 7 overs.
The game was an exciting one with the momentum being swung like a see-saw and Victory CC emerging winners in the end.
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