Teenage boys. There is hardly anything we are better at than doing nothing , realize we are doing nothing and still not care. Then what magical power can motivate a bunch of us to wake up early on a Sunday morning after a Saturday filled with order-in food, excessive gaming and absolutely no attempt at homework,coursework and making something out of our lives?
Cricket. If there is one thing that makes us hate each other, love each other, hate our country and love our country to equal ,unimaginable amounts , it is the game of cricket. Take the Indian cricket team :
Last April ? GODS. Nothing and no-one could touch them.
Sachin Tendulkar retains demigod status.
July? A disgrace. Who loses to the English like that?!
Sachin Tendulkar retains demigod status.
September? Revenge attained at home , England lose 5-0!Brownwash!
Sachin Tendulkar retains demigod status.
Currently? We hate them, like we love them! So much tension every game!!!
Sachin Tendulkar retains demigod status.
Cricket comes first, without any exceptions. IPL before Internals, Melbourne Test before Mocks. So it should be understandable that when challenged to a game by a bunch of our good-for-nothing day school peers , we were up for it. Even if it meant 10 o’clock starts.
Oh boy , were we up for it. As everyone else who was attempting to sleep would tell you, these games were pretty heated. Funnily enough , the arguments were always intra-team rather than inter-team , and mostly amongst the day students. We are as sadistic as we are competitive.
Also , us boarders would save our arguments for later in the afternoon, when we tried to explain how whether that shot was a four or six really warranted an argument loud enough to wake up rooms 3,4,5 and 6 on the girls floor. The cricket got pretty heated as well , save for the first game where we were mercilessly torn apart(due to my absence, of course).
The next three were pretty equal, thanks to some pretty special contributions from Arjun and Nikhil on our team every week. Ayush,with his fantastic batting, also deserves a mention. No one else has the sensibility to play out an over without scoring runs when we are chasing a triple digit total in 15 overs.Love you roomie!
Thus , it was 2-2. That really didn’t work for us, because what is the point in having fun without it being at someone else’s expense?
Poor, poor jokes aside, we now were playing the most important match; the series decider, the match that would decide whether the rest of them were worth it, or just a waste of a Sunday. The match that would decide whether we deserved to be in the Indian team because we would do just as badly , or whether we would do better.
We deserved to be in the Indian team though , no doubts about that. It all looks pretty easy from the TV screen, and we play EA Sports Cricket 07 at Expert difficulty. Yes, expert.
We responded to the facebook thread, profusely abused those who wouldn’t turn up with the choicest of phrases and we were ready for a 10 o’clock start. It went like this:
After being woken up by a barrage of calls from some soon-to-be unfortunate person, Ayush and I looked out onto the astro. Turns out the rest were already on the field. The idea that 10 o clock sharp means 10 :45 at the earliest seems to have been lost on some…
We went for brunch to pick up an apple to get some energy and keep the doctor away , but encountered further delay. No one had informed us that there was butter chicken and parantha for brunch. A good meal later, we made our way upstairs. The customary jokes suggesting a long commute for why us boarders were late were exchanged and we had an 11:00 am start. Not bad for timing!
We lost the toss (coins are biased in this country), and set out to bowl. The day students had a new recruit opening for them. Their team wasn’t that bad , quite a few experienced players. But nothing can beat a team of groggy boarders. Tanay, Bhavik, Shaan , Arjun, Dhruv, Nikhil and Ishaan. The names roll of the tongue like Ganguly, Laxman, Dravid and Sehwag do. Plus , home ground advantage.
We didn’t do so bad. Some pretty tight bowling , great fielding , incredible sledging and advantageously one sided umpiring ensured that in the 15 overs the day students had to bat , we restricted them to a measly 120. The usual suspects were at work again , Nikhil with his all-round brilliance and Dhruv with his deceptively slow deliveries. Yours truly’s complete lack of co-ordination,effort and competency threw some off as well, and I managed to snag a couple of wickets.
Now , for the batting. Enter Arjun and Nikhil. A good start was ensured, but disaster struck as Nikhil’s wicket fell to the day student’s new recruit, Halcyon Price. A quick cameo from Shaan Mehta resulted in a boost to the score , but Halcyon was proving to be quite tricky to face and got himself another wicket. I now had to leave what was proving to be a stellar game of temple run. I had gotten all boosts, had the magnet, was collecting coins at breakneck speed and Shaan decided to get out. I was almost on a 1,000,000 points. Life and its problems! But of course, cricket came first.
Out I went. Halcyon was quite scary looking, since he was getting wickets and all. But the lack of melanin in his skin and lack of sunscreen in his possession made him look like a ripe tomato, so I focused on that. If you have ever tasted Tangy Tomato Kurkure, Sodexo’s initial attempts at Butter Chicken(my current state of mental sanity indicates its improvement), or anything with too much tomato , you would know that once the limit of tomato in anything is exceeded, it becomes rubbish. As much as I adore Halcyon, he was my opponent , and also minutes away from being a deep, deep ,deeeep fried tomato. So Arjun and I treated him and the others like rubbish. Guess it worked.
By the 14th over , we had a partnership of over 100, and were on our way to a pretty imposing total.
Out comes Raivat Madhupati Singhania to bowl the last over. He seemed to have learnt a thing or two from Mr.Goyal about deceptively slow bowling , because we finished the over with six runs only. More importantly, I got out. Life over. We did get a lead of 40-odd though , and Arjun batted through the innings!
Two more innings to go, but we got lazy and those were quite unimportant really. We spent more energy arguing about reducing the number of overs from 15 to 12 than we did playing those two innings. The day students were tired as well, their batting as useless as Halcyon’s natural sunlight resistance. We skittled the day students out for some measly total and made no work of chasing that down as well.
The win was anti-climactic for a while, but then we realized we were champions! VICTORY! SUPREMACY! BRAGGING RIGHTS FOR EVER AND EVER AND EVER!
We shook hands just to smile in their faces, and returned to our figurative seats of smug superiority. Ignoring their requests for another match, back to Mahindra House we went to raid the kitchen and spread the smell of victory(read excessive body odour).
All in all , a fun five mornings. Totally worth getting up for. It felt good to do some form of exercise to ensure that we didn’t get the heart attacks our diets were bound to give us, and it was actually great to go play some cricket and interact with real people in the real world. Xbox live and the Playstation network do have their disadvantages. All that is needed now is to severly injure any day student who we know is capable of playing cricket, and then the boarders shall challenge the day students to another series!
Oh, and before I end, I think we all must thank Tanay Shah for his brilliant wicketkeeping in the boarders’ first innings of the fifth game. Without his intentional miss of an easy run-out and his obliviousness to the knick from Arjun’s bat , hell would have broken loose. As they say , all is fair in love and war! And cricket is both.Simultaneously.
As Sachin Tendulkar retains his demigod status, I must now conclude and find other ways to procrastinate.
:)
By the way , I am not the arrogant (insert appropriate expletive here) that I have made myself out to be in my objective recount above. Some say I am worse, some say I am way worse, but honestly, I am a nice guy. I recycle.
Ishaan, you are a man of your word.
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