Game On!

Not a week had passed by and we had already spoke to the opponents and fixed a match. Fixed, in the sense, fixed the timings and not in the context of our famous slap-gate controversial star. Also, for those who are scratching their heads and trying to wonder why there is so much hair fall and dandruff along with a very serious doubt of what I am talking about, here is the answer, Cricket. Sorry Soccer fellows, wrong time for taking up a sport that is considered a sin, especially during the FIFA WC phase, wherein, all those who follow it are either die hard fans of soccer or ready to die hard to understand soccer. I fall in the second category, as in yesterday was the first time I had witnessed a goal being scored during a LIVE telecast! There is nobody to blame, I grew in a surrounding wherein my friends were ready to watch each and every ball of a cricket match, irrespective of the timings. So, it is one such incident that I am going to talk about. The very first cricket match in my college, though I was 6 months lagging behind my fellow batch mates, who went to play cricket in the very few days after college had started! So approximately 14 hours before our first match, after our not-so-professional-yet-important practice session, we sat down to count the number of heads for the next day's match. We were surprised, there were more than we had imagined. Actually there were 6 than our expected count of five, which means in a game of cricket, leaving apart an important figure "wicketkeeper" in the side, a team needs to have few specialists in the Batting and Bowling departments. Since a group of us had started this team, we considered ourselves specialists. Now do not smile! The smiling part comes only if yo had witnessed the group of players we had gathered to fill up the remaining 5 shoes in our team. The additional five were really good by heart that they accepted to play for us, though they never knew the match was at 6:00 am. They did get up, probably for the last time in the four years, and played their one and only match. I am actually glad they did. It was because of them, we had played our first match and who knows what would have happened if we had skipped it. Then came the alarm at 5:30 the next morning, our core group got up somehow with our red zombie-eyes and took turns to wake the rest of them. The previous day, we managed to borrow a bat and a stump. So, as a team we had 2 bats and a stump and a ball, which never seemed to lose interest in the shoes of the batsman, in the sense they never bounced! And of course, there we were the chosen 11. After cursing the cold weather and rubbing the hands, to make it warm and I never rub them hard, for once I did it very badly and resulted in my skin getting peeled off. Leaving apart that rubbing segment and that odd fellow in every gang, who sneezes the hell out and bringing a mild attack early in the morning, we were quite all set. We, the ones who had formed, were really excited and determined to perform well in our match. After a number of phone calls and missed calls(very prominent in a college guy's life) , the opponents had finally arrived. I knew most of the faces, some were cursing their captain for setting up a match that early, some were checking our bats and some were inspecting the damp pitch and some with mufflers on their either ears, were half asleep. The toss was done, and I am not sure who won it, but the result is we were asked to bat. The last evening, my team's captain had asked me to open the innings and I did not oppose, which I for a moment thought I should have. My palms were frozen and I could hold the grip on my bat. None of the bats seemed comfortable. I was the Nonstriker. The bowler, the opponent team's captain, had set the field up with a quite open field on the off side and a slip and backward point and a quite dominating leg side field. My partner after scoring a couple of runs, got out. The number three in our team, my captain, joined me. He said "Stay" . I got my chance at the crease the next over. My first delivery. The captain had not changed the field, the extra cover was wide open. I saw the cover fielder rubbing his eyes, thought he might not be that active. The bowler came running in, I held my bat tighter, kept my eyes on the ball, not on the weird position the ball was held onto and not on the trying-to-be-aggressive face of the bowler, just the eyes on the ball, he had released, it was over-pitched, there was no time for me to slog, I just opened the face of my bat towards the extra cover direction and middle-ed it. Within a flash, the ball crashed into the fence on the off side. A boundary. I  just did not move, the ball had raced, I had not kept my bat down, kept looking at the ball as it had hit the middle of the bat and past the cover fielder and just rammed onto the boundary. I was admiring it. I saw my captain, he smiled.