We played in Wrentham, home ground for our Eagles sponsored Mathworks MSCL team. We won the toss and decided to bat since it worked well last game. Nachiket and Ashish opened and the idea was to keep it busy with single, double, single, double [sic, quote from last week match]. We were busy right off the first ball and kept it going with a target if 20 in 5 overs. We beat it and in the meanwhile lost Ashish to some miscommunication during the awesome running between the wickets. Pritish went in next and showed some aggressiveness before getting out. Priyank joined Nachi and kept the Incredibles, sorry, MCC 1 going well. Priyank got caught behind and Amol went in. He had a streaky innings with a bunch of dropped catches but mistimed a ball to get caught on the offside. Kaushik went in and was caught off a mistimed shot as well (?). Suddenly we had lost 3 wickets in a considerably short time so we wanted a good partnership since Nachiket was going strong. Nachi discarded loose balls with disdain and nothing seemed to trouble him. Enter Onomitra. He played a good innings mostly thanks to captain Rahul urging him to go for shots (to Ono’s annoyance). They finished the innings well with two double digit run overs and ended up with 117. Ono had 18*(23) and Nachi 62*(54). Our bowling plan was simple. We wanted to avoid short balls (info was that the opposing team had good muscle and will go for their shots) at all cost and try to not give easy singles (which was our strength during our batting). Swarooph and Kaushik opened the bowling. They bowled two overs each and after giving away some streaky singles had already the side down 3-4 wickets. Sureshwar and Rahul came in next and kept it tight and kept pegging wickets away. Amol joined the bowling party and showed his bowling form to the Avengers captain Ankit who took the WK duties after Ono pulled something when going for a reaction catch. We knew we had the habit of letting teams come back in after a strong bowling start so, we kept our focus and finished the job to get a good victory. P.S: Nachi continued his form and scored ~25* to win the afternoon Eagles game as well. So he needs >10 runs in the repeat of last year’s final in MPL to score a 100 for this week.
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