CCC1 continue winning ways

Rakesh S.

Team1 played Akron CC on Sunday. We won the toss and asked Akron to bat first. Prasad and Gautam opened the bowling. The first few overs did
not go well. Extras, some very good hits and bad umpiring saw their score race to 50/0 in 8 overs. They lost their first wicket in the 9th
over at the score of 50 for a well held catch by Ravi P. off Gautam. At this juncture Sundeep and Ani put the screws on, later followed by
Ptarick and Sunny. Despite several bad calls in the inital overs, some of them real blatant non-calls we got the Akron team all out for 122 in
31 overs. We held almost all our catches with some excellent catching by Ravi P. and kaushal P. Patrick 3, Ani, Sundeep and Sunny 2 and
Gautam 1 were the wicket takers.

Ravi N. and Gautam opened the batting for us. Both started out in excellent fashion. Gautam in one over taking 10 runs. Gautam was first
to go trying to go over the top of the infielders to very well held catch at long-off. Ravi and Ani moved the score along some more and
then Ani fell. That brought Patrick to the crease with our score reading around 60/2. Patrick fell for zero for the first time in the
tournament to an excellent back peddling catch at long off. All this while Ravi N. was saying he will keep his head down and hold one end as
there was no pressure to score fast. Well, very next ball he ended up giving a catching practice at point. :-) 3 quick wickets made some of
us a bit anxious and brought life to Akron's demoralized players. They started bowling and fielding well. Prasad and Sunny moved the score
alng with Sunny holding his end down. Prasad managed to hammer out a towering 6 but went soon after that. At this stage another 35 runs were
needed for victory. Ravi P. and Sunny played with lot of application and their heads down to see us through without any more damage. Altough
occassional rush of blood by both would give us some anxious moments. In the end Team1 won comfortably by 5 wickets. Ravi N. 30, Gautam,
Prasad, Ravi P. and Sunny 12-18 runs were the main scorers. As it stands right now, Team1 should be in the next round although I
don't know where we would be ranked. I know for sure we will not be one of the top 4 teams, so will not get a bye irrespective of if we win the
next game or not. It would be an exceptionally huge win (around 2 rr differential) for us to have a chance of finishing 4th and thus getting
a bye. Hopefully once all the scores are posted we will have a better idea. So as it stands right now, Team 1 is to play Cuyahoga next
Saturday and after that we should have 2 weeks off and then have a pre-QF game in Columbus.