CricEd

It was a rapid-fire but a fruitful season for the boys. Both our U13 teams have now played all their games barring one that is scheduled in August.  A team, led by Ismail Omar, played 9 games and won 7, lost 1 and got a walkover over Fossum. Haugerud U13, against whom we have lost three games in last three years proved to be our nemesis again. We lost the first game against them in the penultimate ball by 7 wickets. Haugerud's Husnain Masood had hit such huge sixes in that game that anyone's moral could have gone down. But a week later, the boys bounced back nicely. We made a plan to bowl slow yorker length balls to Masood and boys executed beautifully, getting him out in the second over. Following that the Haugerud team got all out giving us a modest total of 64 that the boys achieved in the 7th over without loosing any wickets.  The take away from this season would be the courage shown by Haider Ali and Pranaov Ranjith to open the bowling against Haugerud despite knowing how...

  2020 will remain a landmark year for people who lived through the first global pandemic in the 21st century. For me it will remain a year when I started with cricket coaching. That year in September when the first wave of Covid-19 was dying down, Bijeyata, my partner in crime, was asked by our cricket club, Vestli CK, to join hands for coaching the U13 boys’ team. She was looking for weekend jobs then and was happy to oblige. I started hanging out with her at the sessions and contributed when required. Speaking for both of us, it was a dive down the deeper end as we came with zero experience of cricket/sports coaching. However, both of us had our share of ‘teaching’ experience coming from homes with teaching as a staple profession. As fate would have planned it within a short time, the main coach of the U13 team had to leave and that is when Bijeyata and I had to take full control of the squad. While there was a decent six months of gap between us starting and taking over the ...