ECS Day 5 - Badalona & Catalunya Jaguars

On our fifth day of action we were to face Badalona and Jaguars again, hoping for a repeat of the “surprise” victory against Badalona and maybe an upset against the Jaguars!

Badalona scorecard
We won the toss and elected to bowl against Badalona, the same tactic we used in the first game. Things looked good after two balls, when Shriram Bhosale dismissed Nitesh caught and bowled. Sadly, the other opener Omar Ali was in fine form and proceeded to dispatch (nearly) everyone around the park. Despite no one else scoring more than 19, his 107 projected Badalona to a well-above par 170/6. He was only stopped by Kieran O’Donnell, playing his first ECS game, who was trusted with the final over. Having got Omar bowled he claimed two more wickets with the final two balls to end with impressive figures of 3/7. 

Despite knowing that the chase was highly unlikely, we went out to attack and try our best. There were some decent knocks from Shriram (23 off 10), Umer Razi (34 off 15), Burhan Ejaz (24* off 10) and Jack Jewson (14* off 6) but we were always well behind the rate and we finished on 122/4 from our 10 overs.​

Jaguars scorecard
Our second game of the day was against Catalunya Jaguars, who were performing well and had comfortably beaten us in our two previous matches. We won the toss and elected to bat. Ali Warriach, promoted to open the batting, top scored with 30 but most struggled to get the ball away with any consistency. James Bentley, in at 7 also got a very quick 28 off 11 balls. There was some running chaos in the final over which ended with the commentator singing the Benny Hill tune to Burhan and Pep Mateos’ running off the last ball! We finished on 112/8, which was unlikely to trouble the Jaguars.

Sure enough, they made short work of it and chased down the total in 7.2 overs. Hamza Dar, having scored a century against us in the first game, scored 83 before Kieran had him caught and bowled. It was to be the only wicket we’d get in the innings. 

Two defeats in the day but we’d be back the very next day with three must-win games, and ones in which we fancied our chances. 

​​Sam Phillipps