Ready for the next level ?!?

Personally, I have been asking for a loss before the playoffs, mainly for a few reasons. The true team spirit shows up when you lose a game. When you see team players blaming each other or opponents after a loss, then you know there is something wrong with the team. But nothing like that happened. On the contrary, all members were ready to take it as a lesson learned and practice harder for the next game. It was really good to see a sign of a true team. I am glad that we lost this game as a team. The opponents performed well and took the game away. The credit goes to them for that effort.

Anyways, a couple of mishaps took place in the morning, and whoever knows me knows that I rarely find myself reaching the ground late on a given game day. My philosophy is that the captain has to be on the ground at the proper time for every game. I take full responsibility and promise it will not happen again. They say nothing goes right when you don’t start the morning right. I was a total mess and when I reached the ground, I got a grand welcome from the team :). The opponents won the toss and chose to field as expected. I will make the batting part short, the batting part was good considering the wet field condition in the morning. Hariprasath #MrCool&Calm stood out with his batting skills and batted almost throughout the innings. We set up an infamous score of 69 for opponents.

We were confident to defend this score considering our performance in bowling and fielding in recent games. But there always comes a day where nothing goes right in the game, and we cannot depend on every game to go as planned. There were a couple of missed catching opportunities and tight fielding was lacking. Luck was not on our side, catches were landing in no-man areas. We had the game on our side throughout except at the end. They had 2 batsmen with good shoulder strength who were swinging at every ball they face. Finally, they connected in 1 over and took the game away. There are no regrets as we gave a good fight and personally, I am happy that we got a taste of loss before going to the playoffs. Now our team will be tested on how we bounce back in the rest of the season.

Going back to the title of this report, the time has come for this team to go to the next level.

1. We are good in the bowling area, but now we need to focus on smart bowling. Try to read the batsmen and bowl in the right areas. If possible, try and learn to have variation in the bowling.

2. We need a strong middle-order lineup in batting which will help bump up the score or chase any score with ease. So it’s time to work on the batting to hit the ball in the sweet-spot area of the bat instead of trying to hit every ball out of the park. Trust me, once you middle the ball, you can guide the ball anywhere on the ground.

3. Just a few more weeks to go for playoffs, so try to work on your fitness with cardio workouts which will help you be agile on the field. We need to attack the ball while fielding. We will keep working on the catching area.

Have fun on the field but don’t let it distract you from the overall team goal. The team goal is not to win every game, but to give more than 100% on the field. I have full confidence in this team that we will come out of this and do good from now on. Thanks for all your effort!

Here is the scorecard.