In what proved to be a match full of action between BITS Pilani and Technological Institute of Textile and Sciences, Bhiwani, Haryana (TIT&S) with the bowlers doing a brilliant job for their respective teams, it was BITS Pilani who emerged victorious after a 40-over epic battle between these two teams.

BITS won the toss and predictably chose to do what they do the best, bat first. However, in contrast to their previous match against BITS Hyderabad, TIT&S was no pushover and gave the BITS batting lineup a real run for their money. At the 18-over mark, it seemed that BITS was heading towards a below par score, but a few lusty blows from Harsha and Adit at the death, combined with shoddy fielding from the boys from Haryana helped BITS to push the total to a fighting total of 123/6.

At the mid-innings mark, the team from Haryana seemed in high spirits knowing that they had done a good job with the ball. Meanwhile the home team looked determined to make the chase to be a tough nut to crack for the visiting team. BITS got off to a brilliant start with the team from Haryana losing their opener for a two-ball duck. This was followed by a controversial dismissal as the other opener, Yashu, made his way back to the pavilion, being given out LBW when the ball had clearly hit the bat before hitting the pad, causing a massive uproar amongst the TITS supporters. As the match progressed, the umpire got fired up by the comments of the visiting team and their fans resulting in a near-physical altercation between the TITS fans and the umpires. Finally, both the captains stepped in to control the situation and ensured that the match continued without any more delays on the part of the match officials. As the match progressed, the visiting team chose to go after everything resulting in some quick-fire scoring. The downside of this was that they lost wickets at regular intervals. The turning point of the match was when they lost the well-settled pair of Rahul and Sachin in quick succession. Despite dropping catches and committing misfields, the bowling was good enough to create enough chances to wipe out the batting of the visiting team. The highlight of the match was when Sachin got his off-stump ripped out in a typical Glenn McGrath fashion off the bowling of Abhinav Modi.

The TITS batting eventually folded up well short of their target losing the match by a huge margin. Despite having won all their matches quite easily now, there still is a lot of room for improvement in the home team’s performance, particularly in the fielding department. The BITS Pilani team members are surely on their toes as they head into an all-important final on Monday against IIT-Delhi.