Wycombe House hosted Twickenham in a high stakes MDL Shield quarter final. The winners would get to claim bragging rights over their local rival and progress into the semi finals. The pressure was on both teams to pull out a performance.

Wycombe House off to a flier
Twickenham lost the toss and had to bowl first. Dom Thamby opened the bowling with Ozzie Qavi and tried to exert pressure on the home team. Chances, however, were squandered early on and Wycombe House’s openers capitalised. They started to find the boundary and were scoring quite easily with the score 50-0 after 7 overs.

This prompted a bowling change which would ultimately shift the momentum for a large part of the innings. Darhsit Mashar was brought in and kept it tight with his off-spin bowling. He was tough to score off and eventually got the break through that the Ts needed. Sanjit Snadhu was bowling at the other end and found his rhythm as he got into his spell.

The pair bowled well together and Twickenham started to put pressure on the home side, taking further wickets to get them 3 down. Sandhu’s spell was now over as he could only bowl 5 overs, so the captain called for Simret Mangat who ripped through Wycombe House’s middle order, taking 3 crucial wickets to leave Twickenham on top.

The skipper took Mashar off to save his overs for later in the innings and continued his good work, setting up one batsman by luring him into hitting the ball over the top. The deadly googly bowler was supported at the other end by his young left arm spinner, Shreeraj Chauhan. Chauhan continued to cause trouble against the top batsman, got a wicket in his first over by working over the batsman and bowling him out.

The Boy with Bucket Hands
The score was 127-7 off 30 overs and Wycombe house took a further loss thanks to a great catch at mid-off from the boy with bucket hands, Ajmal Allahdad. Darshit Mashar and Dom Thamby were brought back on to clean up the tail but a great partnership from number 9 and 10 added a further 65 runs to frustrate the bowling side.

It was eventually the captain himself who bowled Wycombe House out for 193 off 38.3 overs. To win and progress through to the semis Twickenham needed 194 off 40 overs.

Struggling Start
Things did not start well as Ajmal Allahdad’s innings ended prematurely thanks to a great ball. This brought together Nikhil Nomula and Sandhu and they made batting look very easy, playing low risk cricket to boost Twickenham’s score to 70-1 off 15 overs. However, a mix-up led to Sandhu’s dismissal. He batted well for his 33, and this brought Varad Rampal out to the middle. Nomula soon got himself out on 37 and Darshit Mashar was bowled without troubling the scorers too much.

This left Twickenham in a strange predicament. The score was 93-4 off 19.4 overs and in the middle were Rampal and Muhammed Ahmed. This would be the telling partnership of the match. Rampal batted very sensibly, showing great game awareness to get quick singles . At the other end, Ahmed would smash anything too full to the boundary and ended up hitting some huge sixes. Neither did anything reckless though, but instead they played fearless, positive cricket to get the Ts into a winning position.

Middle-Order Wobble
Ahmed eventually fell for a match winning 48 and Sim Mangat also fell straight after. This brought Robbie Bosier, our gun batting-all-rounder, to the crease with the score 175-6 off 33 overs. We only need a further 19 from 7 overs. Sensible cricket was all it took and that’s how Rampal and Bosier played. The overs were catching up to them though.

With the pressure on Rampal as the senior batsman in the middle took matters into his own hands and unleashed boundries to finish the job off and get to 50 (the first player for Twickenham to do this in the MDL 2017).

Onwards and Upwards
Twickenham beat rivals Wycombe House by 4 wickets with 3 overs to spare. This means they progress through to the semi-finals of the shield and the scenes at the end of the match were great as in the spirit of the game we clapped Wycombe House off the field. We were humble in victory as we knew that there was not much in it between the sides and that it was a very close game.

After all that was over we were all in joy after a stunning performance from the team, but the day deserved to go to Varad Rampal and Mo Ahmed for an excellent partnership which won us the match. This side continues to go from strength to strength and each performance becomes better than the last. It is a fantastic group of players to play with and hopefully our determination as a side can get to win the tournament.

By Shreeraj Chauhan