SCCG®: Play Green, Play for our Future

The SCCG captain Adil won the toss and decided to bat first on Sunday, 27.09.2020 at Ball park Graz.

The start for SCCG came really slow, with dew playing a large role. Though it looked sunny and a perfect day for batting, the wet ball due to dew in the outer circle played its role for the bowlers. In addition, the Lions bowlers were bowling with good pace and length control, so the SCCG couldnt get off to a start. The score at the end of the power play (4 overs) was 23/2. Raman made a steady cameo at number 5, with a score of 14 runs. After the powerplay, the SCCG batsmen were under a lot of pressure to add runs, increased only by some intelligent bowling by kumud and raja. In the 9th over by manoj, 2 wickets fell in succession and zero runs came off the bat, probably making it one of the best overs in the tournament. By 9 overs, the SCCG had just put up 38 runs for 6 wickets. Finally some hope for the batting team in the form of a steady partnership between Karthik and Atef, who added 38 runs in 5 overs, bringing the SCCG total to 77/8 in the 15 overs allotted.

With just 78 to defend, the SCCG bowlers had a tremendous task ahead of them. Adil and Safi started off really well with consistent pace and length, and almost everytime found the bat edge.By power play end, the Lions batsmen were restricted to 25 runs. Impeccable fielding by SCCG players also made it tough for the lions batsmen to score. Two spectacular stops by Venkat and Ali, which would have resulted in catches unfortunately, gave more motivation for the other SCCG players. Raman came in after powerplay with his offspin and did a wonderful job as always. Karthik joined raman during the spin spell but was quite expensive. He dropped the catch of abhijeet, who hit him for a six and a four later in the over, right at the first ball of the over! Raman came back with an amazing over which resulted in three wickets and just 4 runs. Runs were coming at a steady pace, but the SCCG gave a scare to the lions with a sudden barrage of wickets falling. At the end, with just 4 to win from 5 overs, Safi came up with an exiting over taking 2 wickets – which would have been 3, if the leg umpire did not (wrongly) call out a noball and safi had taken a wonderful diving catch off his own bowling. Eventually in the same over, the Lions reached the target and SCCG had lost the match.

With each team in Group A having 2 points each, net run rate was used to decide who played the Big finals, the small finals or were out of the tournament. With a low score in this match, the SCCG had the least runrate, so were knocked out of the tournament while Lions came first and GTCC 2nd in group A of the BiG tournament 2020.

The Graz Cricket Academy (GCA) eventually came first place in the BIG finals against Lions, and GTCC came in 3rd position with their win over ASCC in the SMALL finals. Congratulations to the gold winners GCA, silver medalists Vienna Lions, and bronze medalists GTCC. With this, the SCCG outdoor season 2020 in Austria comes to an end. Heartful thanks to ACA/ÖCV and GCA for organising this nice event in Graz.