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Missed chances

The Deodhar Trophy tournament was wide open when we went to Ahmedabad for the game against East Zone. The tournament this year was held in the West Zone. With the venues being Rajkot, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Bombay and Pune, you could put your last rupee on the line and say that it will be a batters' tournament. Also, the Indian team's performance in Australia meant that anyone having a consistently good tournament would be ensured a place in either of the three teams for the Challenger Trophy.

The general standard of one-day cricket in the country has gone up, with most teams having a specialist pinch hitter at the top of the order and extremely good fielding sides.

West Zone played their first two games at Rajkot on what Sitanshu Kotak, the captain of Saurashtra, will tell anyone whose listening, is the mother of all batting wickets. On that wicket, Richard Hadlee once took nine wickets for 54 runs for the visiting Kiwis against the West Zone side in 1988. This, after the match started three hours late due to non-arrival of the Kiwis' luggage from Bombay. Only God could have done better!!! All the boys agreed that 300 was par for the course at the Municipal ground. In the end, we fell short by 30 runs in the first game, chasing 312 against North, and then won with three overs to spare while chasing 317 against South Zone three days later.

Pretty much the same sort of scores were expected in our next game against East Zone. The wicket looked an absolute beauty, without a blade of fresh grass on it, and the batters were rubbing their hands in glee while the fast bowlers shook their heads in resignation and dreamt that wishful dream when they would have something in the pitches for themselves and their slower counterparts. "One day maybe," I could almost hear them saying.

We lost an important toss as we were keen on chasing like we had done in the first two games. Our game plan was to field first and then leave things to our dynamic duo of Kambli and Muzumdar to take the game away from the opposition as they had done in the previous match. Alas! It was not to be.

Nilesh Modi went early to Javed Zaman and then after a couple of hefty blows, our pinch hitter Iqbal Siddiqui also holed out to an excellent catch at mid-off. In walked Vinod Kambli and, in keeping with his murderous domestic form, just dismissed the first ball from his presence to the boundary. Before this innings, Vinod had scored five hundreds in six domestic matches in keeping with his domestic record wherein he has chalked up 85-plus as his average runs per innings. I do not want to tempt fate for this great buddy of mine, but an India recall looks very much on the cards for 'Dezzy' boy.

After the initial boundaries, Vinod looked for the ones and twos and by the time he was out playing on for 82, he had built up a platform for a 290 to 300 score for West Zone. At the other end, Sitanshu Kotak was doing the job asked of him from the team management, and was nearing his hundred. We ended up at 262 in 50 overs and this was largely due to the fact that the in-form Amol Muzumdar did not click. That was a big blow, especially after we had also lost Vinod in the preceeding overs.

East Zone started off with a bang and it was S S Das who looked in prime nick from the word go. He is a very positive player like his partner at the other end, Nikhil Haldipur, who seemed to be capable of hitting boundaries at will. I have played alongside Haldipur in Pakistan a few times and have always loved watching him from the other end because he is a very instinctive player. Das managed to hit a wide long hop from Siddiqui straight to Kambli at point and then Rohan Gavaskar got a first baller, as you sometimes do, playing back to be bowled. In spite of this mini collapse, Parida and Haldipur went along their merry ways and got runs at will until a reckless shot by Haldipur cost him his wicket.

Saba Karim walked in and played very fluently. He along with Parida, and then Sanjay Raul, saw to it that East did not lose the tempo of scoring. Nayan Mongia, the West skipper, tried shuffling his bowlers around, but it was not till he introduced Kotak into the attack that he got a breakthrough.

Kotak bowls slow left arm spin, or should I say very slow left arm spin, and appears innocuous. But as Karim found out, he is far from being an innocuous bowler. Kotak had him stumped by Mongia while going for a big hit.

Rajeev Kumar played sensibly to avert any further mishap and East eventually crossed our score of 262 in the 48th over.

That left only two contenders for the Deodhar trophy, North and South. North went on to beat South and claim the title and we salvaged some pride by beating Central in our last match to take second spot in the tournament.

In the final analysis, ours was a tale of missed chances. Had we beaten East, the trophy could well have been ours.

Deodhar Trophy round-up