I wanted to write this post from a long time. I faced an instance where one mistake made by me changed everything and made my world fall flat on its face. This happened during one of the cricket matches held as part of the inter hostel tournament in our institute.
I do agree that the level of talent is not that great, but still it was fight among equals. So I guess its worth pondering over.
Ours was the depleted defending champion team with some important players moving to other hostels ala players moving to other clubs :). Before this match we had lost one and won one and we needed to win this to move to the next round. The same was the case with the opponent team .
We scored a healthy 71 of 12overs with me contributing an unbeated 30 including a last ball six . I was happy that everything was going our way . Actually I offered a catch on the penultimate ball of the innings, it turned out to be a no ball and we managed to score 11 more runs in the next two balls.
We started off very well in the bowling as well with the score around 27 for the loss of 3 wickets in 6 overs. That meant that they had to score 45 in the other 6 while I had two overs left of those ( I have confidence in my bowling ability that they could not score more that 4-5 runs per over). By the way, boundaries were hard to score on this ground since the lines were too far for the ball to carry.
We had to use atleast four bowlers with each bowler bowling a maximum of 3 overs. All the bowlers started off well, there was no need to try out the fifth option . But since everything was going according to plan, and after being suggested by another player to try out this option, I decided to give the fifth bowler an over.
The first ball was mishit in the air and went straight to the fielder at the boundary . He got both his hands to it but somehow managed to drop it and to make it worse let it cross the boundary . The next ball was a long hop and was hit for a six . The next ball was even worse and was hit for another six. 18 runs came off that over and the match was as good as lost in that over.
Though we managed to put up a fight and take it till the last over, the match was well and truly lost in "that" over. One mistake has resulted in me losing sleep for 2-3 days :) . I was hoping to win atleast some points for my hostel but ended up a dud being ousted off the tournament without any points .
