One of the many attractions of test match cricket is watching the contest between bat and ball. However, it isn’t frequent that you see a batsmen, of the quality of a Ponting or a Tendulkar fighting hard for survival, with the thought of scoring runs far away.

Cometh the ODI and T20 formats, the contest is tilted towards the batsmen, who play the boss, and bowlers at times are simply minions. Pitches are tailor made for batsmen to plonk their front-foot down the pitch, and make the bowler pay for even the smallest of mistakes.

Cometh the hard-tennis-ball cricket that we play, pitches aren’t maintained, they certainly are not tailor made. They aren’t as bad as the ‘uncovered pitched’ of the 1930’s or so; the contest between bat and ball is more even. Scoring at four runs to the over can be challenging; scoring at five or more will certainly win you more matches than you lose. Bowlers and batsmen are always in the game. The age old adage, one ball is all it takes to dismiss a batsmen, rules aplomb.

That being said, it’s still rare to see a quality batsman, getting worked over for five out of the six deliveries of an over, and put out of his misery off the final delivery of the same over. As rare as it is, that is exactly what happened at the start of the season to Ankit, courtesy of Kaushik. The entire over was filled with ooh’s and aah’s, with Ankit at his usual, applauding the bowler with due sincerity, after being beaten clean, ball after ball after ball, with the final ball of the over spraying Ankit’s stumps. Ankit appreciated Kaushik’s bowling, as all of us stood by in amazement at the bowling, and bewilderment at Ankit’s gestures. We’d witnessed one of the best spells of fast bowling, and neither did we travel far, nor pay through the nose, to be a part of it.

Kaushik apparently, as we found out much later, is a middle-order batsmen, and only bowls occasionally, albeit in the dearth overs. This we learned via a monstrous 65 off just 33 deliveries, including 11 boundary hits, and one six, in a successful chase of 91, achieved in 14.3 overs.

MPL-1, circa 2009, surprisingly revealed Adai the fast-bowler, to go with Adai the batsman that we knew off. What’s with player’s not being upfront about their skills? Jeez!

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It was a tough first day for Mayank, and it all started as soon as he came on for a bowl. Rafeeq, his captain, dropped a sitter off Mayank’s first delivery of the season. Rafeeq then moved a few steps to his right, probably hoping to be better placed to field and catch the next one that comes his way.

Stupendously, another catch came Rafeeq’s way, off the very next ball, and some may call this a sitter too. However, the ball and Rafeeq appeared to be in different zip-code’s, courtesy of Rafeeq’s pro-active (or was it reactive?) move a minute back. Of course, given that he’d just dropped a sitter off the previous ball, there were no guarantees that he’d have taken the second catch anyway!

The batsmen were able to amble through for an easy single on this occasion, which very likely pricked Mayank. As if that weren’t enough, the fielder towards whom the ball went, tried to hit the stumps on the full for no apparent reason – the batsmen had already completed the single. To rub salt into a growing wound, there were two over-throws.

Mayank’s spell of three overs went for more than 20 runs. Things certainly weren’t going Mayank’s way!

If Mayank thought that the day couldn’t get any worse, he was in for a seriously rude shock – Rafeeq, having dropped two catches, had the audacity to compare Mayank’s bowling to mine (Raghuvir) – really? I wonder if that was a sledge aimed at Mayank, or a compliment passed my way!

At times, you just have to go through the motions, and hope a new day starts soon. When it came to batting, Mayank scratched around for a 6th ball duck – off the bowling of Adai, and caught by me!

To cap off a really ugly day, Pune Warriors, lead by Sourav ‘Dada’ Ganguly, beat the Chennai Super Kings. Certainly an inauspicious start to the season! Hopefully, just Murphy’s law toying with Mayank.

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