July 27^th 2002 Gastonia, NC: This was TCC’s 9^th league match for this season.  TCC had emailed TFCC the previous day requesting a 10:30am start that didn’t evince a reply.  Nevertheless, we reached Gastonia at 10:15am, 15 minutes ahead of the promised time.  TFCC had only 6-7 players there and we waited for sometime before going for the toss.  Alvin Smith from Lake Norman was the neutral umpire for the match.  The square leg umpire as always was from the batting side.  We went for the toss and even at this time TFCC didn’t have their playing eleven.  TFCC won the toss and elected to bat first.  The sun had already given an inkling of the temperature for the remainder of the day.  Phew!  It was hot.  We started the game at 11:20am.

The old adage goes “Catches win matches”.  We strived hard to contradict this all through the day and amazingly pulled it off by some excellent batting later in the day.  TFCC began with Shakoor and Safkat, both being right-handed batsmen.  The latter immediately benefited from TCC’s generosity on the field.  Samir (usually a safe catcher) missed a straightforward catch at 2^nd slip off Aravind in his very first over.  Shakoor was severe on Raj in his first over which yielded a couple of boundaries.  But, Raj had the last laugh in the final ball of that over when Sundar caught a blinder at square leg off a powerful flick.  Pervez joined Safkat the crease.  Safkat had another life in Aravind’s 2^nd over, Raj being the culprit this time.  It was a full-blooded cover-drive that flew to Raj who misjudged the pace of the ball and was hit on the chest.  Anyway, thankfully, TCC didn’t have to rue those missed chances ‘cos Aravind’s presence of mind on the field paid off yet again.  Safkat drove the ball hard straight to Raj at mid-off and took off for a non-existent run and Raj took a shy at the non-striker’s end ‘cos Pervez had backed up too much.  I (Vijay) tried to backup, but the ball went thru me off the speedy concrete surface and into Aravind’s (backing up) hands who threw it to Syed to complete the runout and hence caught Safkat inches short of his crease.  Sohib came in and along with Pervez tried to consolidate.  Pervez meanwhile got a life when he lofted the ball high and wide, but Aravind at long off who got both his hands to the ball spilled it.  Sundar was the unlucky bowler.  Raj accounted for Sohib by bowling him all ends up and eventually Pervez was adjudged leg before off Samir’s bowling. 

The wicket of the day followed when Sundar delivered a coup-de-grace to Quaiser who could have single-handedly taken the match away from TCC going by previous experience.  It was a beautiful slow in-swinging Yorker (a Sundar special!) that took Quaiser’s middle stump.  Ejaz along with Sakoot threatened to take the fight to TCC’s camp by some lusty blows.  He was particularly severe on Samir and Ravi, the latter being taken to the cleaners with 2 sixes in one over.  Sakoot was out plumb in front off yours truly.  Ejaz also got a life with Sundar almost pulling off what would have been a great catch running backwards off a miscued pull off the bowling of Hari.  Meanwhile, thanks to some smart piece of work behind the stumps by Syed, Ejaz was out stumped off Hari trying a wild heave.  The previous ball was a wide down the leg, but inspite of that Syed came in and effected the stumping much to our relief.  Enter Shahjee, TFCC’s captain.  He hit a couple of one-handed pulls off Sundar with one of them being a boundary.  We kind of got a sneak preview as to what could be expected later in the day ‘cos Shahjee even while batting kept yelling at umpire Alvin forcing him to declare certain balls that went down on either side of the wicket as wides.  Actually, the point to be noted is that both teams benefited from Alvin’s consistency and lenience about wides.  Leslie threw his bat around a little in Shahjee’s company, but Hari and myself contained them quite a bit.  Aravind accounted for Leslie by uprooting his off-stump.  Salim (their wicketkeeper) came in a hit a huge six off the first ball he faced over long on off Aravind.  TFCC couldn’t go too far ‘cos Shahjee was caught and bowled and their last man Praveen (leftie) was bowled the very next ball in the last over of their innings.  They were all out for 153.