The case of curious Redbirds - Redbirds vs. Beetles

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The Redbirds faced off with Beetles in their second encounter of the Super-12 stage. The stage was set for some good cricket and some of the players from the playing XI had returned to the team after missing a couple of games. Both the Beetles and the Redbirds were riding high on their victories over Veterans and Foce XI respectively. Both of them had made pretty identical scores and the victories had quite an uncanny resemblance.

Beetles won the toss and understandably elected to bat first on a very humid Sunday afternoon. The opening pair provided a decent start to the innings and kept pushing the ball around in the gaps stealing singles at will. The left-hand, right-hand batsman combo was something the Redbirds bowlers had not encountered (except for one game) much before and it appeared to be an unsettling factor initially.

Kedar and Vinod opened the bowling for the Redbirds and kept a tight line and length without giving much room to the batsmen. Dheeraj and Sudheer bowled next as the first bowling change and continued to bowl in a controlled fashion. At the time of first break, Beetles score stood at 30 runs from 7 overs at the loss of no wickets.

Quite predictably the batsmen took on the bowling after the first break and aided with some lose balls scored 50 runs from the next 7 overs and the the end of 14 overs, the score was 80 runs with the loss of two wickets.

Imran and Dheeraj took quite a bit of wood in the 10th and 12th over respectively. As Ravi Patel started to look threatening, and Beetles looked to put up an imposing total, Kedar removed Ravi by trapping him before wickets. With a bit of faltered bowling the Redbirds went into the second break at the end of 14th over.

The last 6 overs however saw the most disciplined bowling performance by the Redbirds bowlers given the circumstances. All the bowlers kept a very tight line and restricted the final score to 115 from 20 overs, thereby having given only 35 runs from the final 6 overs. Even though the bowlers did quite well to restrict the score after the initial Beetles onslaught, the final bowling figures revealed that the quite a few extras has beed gifted to the Beetles - 22 in all (16 wides, 2 no balls and 4 byes). Another interesting factiod is that each one of the first four bowlers started thier quota with an extra.

Chasing an achievable target of 115, Dheeraj and Vinod opened the innings for the Redbirds. Ravi Patel was impeccable in his bowling and on the fifth ball of the innings, he sent the Redbirds back to the bench with a beautiful incoming delivery that broke through Dheeraj's defences and shattered the stumps. Vinod and RK kept rotating the strike, but RK was bowled by Amir in the 4th over. Varun and Vinod put together a valuable 22 run partnership for the third wicket before Varun was run-out due to a terrible mix-up in the middle.

The wicket kept falling at regular intervals from this point on and the Redbirds could never regain control as the required run rate kept creeping up. Sudheer and Kiran put together another valory 26 run partnership for the 7th wicket. Ravi struck again by bowling out Sudheer after being hit around briefly. At the end the Redbirds were able to garner only 86 runs at the end of 20 overs for the loss of 8 wickets.

It makes one curious seeing this performance from the Redbirds and ask a lot of questions. Was it the bowling, was it poor scoring, was it the number of extras, was the poor running between the wickets? No matter what it is, the Redbirds need to refocus now again and as Varun put it "work as a team and win comprehensively". The Redbirds face-off against the Veterans this weekend. Ahmed Rizvi was declared as the man of the match for his score of 33 runs from 40 balls for the Beetles.