After enjoying a bye round earlier, the team was looking forward to play some good cricket and get back to winning ways. It’s been a mixed bag of results so far and the team was keen to give a good performance against the Seven Hills Toongabbie (SHT) team at our home ground.

The Start
SHT won the toss and elected to bat first. Murugs and Yuvi started in tandem with Murugs troubling the openers regularly. He finally got the reward for his tight bowling as one of the opener perished, well caught at slips. SHT then slowed down and started consolidating but it was Murugs again to break the little partnership that was developing. Yuvi on the other end was little inconsistent and was struggling at the end where he was bowling. At 48 for 2, SHT was cruising which is when Murugs decided to bring Yuvi back at the other end to try out whether the change in end will help to break the flow. What a master stroke it was! Yuvi got rid of the well settled opener who was playing for long thus ending a promising partnership for SHT. The score line now read 48 for 3. SHT’s best batsman walked in and played out the over quietly. What happened in Yuvi’s next over was something unforgettable. He found perfect line and length and troubled the batsman a lot. In fact, he got 3 wickets in 4 balls, narrowly missing the hat trick. A perfect in-swinging ball got through the defences of the batsman and clean bowled him. SHT’s skipper walked in next and was cleaned by a perfect in-swinging Yorker. Yuvi was on hat trick but his effort to bowl another Yorker resulted in low full toss thus allowing the batsman to score couple of runs. But Yuvi was not to be denied next ball as he bowled another perfect in-swinger which got the batsman plumb in front of the wicket. Suddenly the score card read 52 for 6 and the match turned on its head.

As always the case with Storm, we let the momentum slip past thus allowing the batsman to settle in and score runs. A 76 runs partnership took SHT to a comfortable position before their late order hit out to get to a score of 171 at the end of 51 overs. Murugs was the best bowler of the day, claiming 4 wickets, who was well supported by Yuvi and Kannan. At one stage, it looked like Storm will fold SHT in a hurry and take the first innings lead but ended up letting them off the hook and chasing a big score.

The Chase
For a change, Vinod Reddy and Avi opened the innings for Storm. In such big chase, opening partnership is very crucial in getting home but unfortunately both the openers got out in quick succession with hardly any runs on the board. Deepak was promoted to one down but he too got out soon, all the wickets to the same bowler. With the score card reading 2 runs for 3 wickets, our crisis man Suraj stepped up with Roshit and forged a fantastic partnership. They thought attack was the best defence given that we had only 13 overs for close of play. Both of them played very positively and attacked the bowlers at every opportunity. Thus the day ended with the score 51 for 3. These two got Storm back on track for the chase and given batting line up we have, it will be a good chase when play resumes.

Rain played spoilsport
A good game of cricket was denied by the nature. Because of heavy downpour early in the morning, the ground condition was not good for play even though sun was shining at the game time. The game was called off. It was a game where both the teams had their chances to win but the nature decided the result in the end. Storm was left to rue their incapability to finish off the innings when SHT were struggling but that’s cricket in a way.