ECS Day 7 - Royal Barcelona (twice!)

Our last day of the competition was also the last day of the group stage. Given the results from the previous day, we knew that we were out but there was still a small speck of pride to play for in terms of not finishing bottom, as well as just wanting another win! Our two games of the day were both against Royal Barcelona, a team that we hadn’t played before. 

Game 1
We once again won the toss (I’m pretty sure we’d win the ECS tossing competition!) and elected to bowl. 
The Royals put on a formidable total, despite a debut ECS wicket for the returning Ravindu Maduranga (flown in from Germany just for the day!) and another for Joseph Danam. Eight bowlers were used in total, as Umer Razi spread the workload around and gave everybody a go. They finished on 162/4.
We got off to an absolute flyer thanks to Ali Warriach (69* off 29). After a couple of cameos from Ravindu and James Bentley, he was joined by Shriram Bhosale who was grateful to break his run of ducks as he scored 47* off 23 balls. Thanks to them, we were in the game until the last over. Needing an unlikely but not impossible 28 to win, the two only managed 10. Their unbeaten 96-run partnership had taken us to our highest score of the tournament of 144/2 but we finished 18 runs short.

Game 2
This time we lost the toss but the Royals elected to bat first again. James once again was the pick of the bowlers with 1/19 from his two overs, but he couldn’t stop Royals just beating their total from the first game as they finished on 166/2, Joseph getting the other wicket with the penultimate ball of the innings. 
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Ravindu shone with the bat scoring 65 off 30 balls, but didn’t get much support from the other end (it was another game where extras were second top scorer…). He was eventually run out in unfortunate circumstances. Shriram top edged a ball onto his chin and Ravindu called him through for a single that ordinarily would be on. He was run out trying to return to the non-striker’s end and Shriram retired hurt the ball after. We’d effectively lost our two biggest hitters in the same ball. No one else could get anywhere near the required rate and we finished on 121/5. 

Thus ended a chastening first experience of the ECS. Despite the results, it brought the club together well and, whilst there are perhaps some scars amongst the players to have played every game(!), in general it was an enjoyable experience and one we can’t wait to repeat at the end of January!

Hats off to James Bentley, Vishesh Gajjar, Shriram Bhosale, Burhan Ejaz and Umer Razi (minus one where he was 12th man) for playing every game!

​Sam Phillipps