There’s nothing like a good game on a relaxed Sunday morning! And I don’t mean just sitting in front of the television and watching someone else play! So, what was I doing out instead of lazing around on a Sunday?

Saturday Morning:: Dad tells me that there’s a cricket match, and I’m supposed to play in his place. “What match?”, I ask him. “It’s the Bharat Petroleum Employees vs. Distributors friendly match”, he says. Now for those of you who have visited http://www.padekar.com , you will probably be knowing that we are distributors for Bharat Petroleum’s LPG division. So, as a matter of courtesy, I took up the offer. (The fact that I wanted to see what kind of form I was in after such a long break, was another matter altogether!)

Sunday Morning:: My brother has a class at 7:30am, and we were to reach the Match Venue by 8am. So we decided to get up around 6:45, and drop my brother off on the way. When we reached, I was surprised at the level of preparation for the match! Both the teams had uniforms, there was a commentator, an official scorekeeper, two neutral umpires (neutral as in independent of Bharat Petroleum), a drummer for cheering on, and quite a sizable audience! Great!! I hadn’t played in such an atmosphere since we organized a Tournament for our students while we were proprietors for Aptech Computers. This was definitely going to be fun!

Willy nilly, they take me into the playing eleven (They had never seen me play by then). The first two batsmen went in, and I was asked what number I’d like to play in. I said, “One down, that is 3rd in the order.” Hesitantly, the captain agreed. So started off the match, with us batting.

The two openers started off a bit hesitant. One of them got out immediately in the second over on a personal score of 5 and a team score of 9. That brought me in the crease. It had been a long time since I had played, so I wanted to get my eye in first, and there were only two balls left in the over anyway. The first one was played defensively. The second one, was a cover drive off the backfoot to get a single. End of the over. I don’t know what came over me the next few balls, because suddenly I could see the ball like a football, and I had no troubling dispatching any and every loose ball to the fence on the on- as well as off-side. Unconsciously, the total score had reached 102 in just 9 overs, after being 10 in 2 overs. I was on 43 off 21 balls, and the captain decided to call us in. After all, it was a friendly match and every player was to be given a bit of a bat! So we retired and the other’s took over. The next 11 overs saw 95 runs coming, the main contributors being extras. Finally, we ended up with a score of 197 off 20 overs.

When the second innings started, the opposition batsmen were pretty good! Some of them were former representatives of the BPCL team in the Sheffield Shield Tournament. So it was going to be interesting! To cut a long story short, they scored 138 off their 20 overs, and we won the match. I was awarded the Best Batsman Award for my initial blitzkrieg on the bowlers which allowed us to have that kind of a score.

It was a lot of fun! And although my body’s aching a bit today, it was very satisfying! Would love to play a bit more of such matches, if time permits!