Oracle Vs ICRISAT Friendly Match

After a long break finally Oracle Hyderabad team were invited to ICRISAT for a friendly match inside the ICRISAT campus on 22nd October Saturday. After so much of practice at our campus nets our team was desperately looking for some practice match (even if it was on mat). We played there last year and beat them with considerable margin however they claimed that their star players were unavailable and finally we had to give them couple of our players to play from their side. That was eventually my last match in that season before I got busy in some courses in IIIT. I had ended up in a high note with a couple of wickets in the same over. This time they were ready with full strength but we had couple of our key players like Captain and Vice-Captain missing. However our line up looked on good paper with a lot of batting depth unlike other tournaments where a lot of bowlers are available and usually bowlers are seen in the bench.



ICRISAT is my second most favorite ground in Hyderabad not only because it has  a lot of greenery around but also one can do other activities like swimming and lawn tennis in the campus. Infosys cricket ground tops my list hence we call it South Africa in our team.



Finally match started around 10 AM local time . It was bright sunny day with an average of 32 degree centigrade.  Oracle won the toss and batted first to set a target of 133 in allotted 20 overs.  Thanks to Debraj who batted in the lower middle for a change and helped to reach this decent total. Ankit hit a couple of big shots to get some quick runs and Sriram almost carried the bat through the innings. The ground was big with a lot of big and hard grass. Hence boundaries were difficult to hit.  ICRISAT despite  getting a good start kept loosing wickets , thanks to back to back wickets by Raja. Finally ICRISAT were all out for 120 with 5 balls to spare when I got the last wicket in the first ball of the last over of the innings. Our overall performance was good but we gave a way too many wides.

We are looking forward to match again in next Saturday !