Cougars Cricket club won the TCC Taped Ball Winter 2013 tournament defeating Grady Cricket Club(GCC) by 13 runs in a great low scoring final. Cougars became Champions for the second consecutive tournament there by becoming the first team in TCC Taped ball history to defend a title. It was a highly competitive tournament involving 12 teams.
On a day with good weather for playing cricket (02/08/2014), Cougars won the toss and elected to bat first. They had a bad start as they lost their inform batsman George in the second over to Sushil. After that Rajesh and Cougars Captain Ashwin steadied the innings with a 60 runs second wicket partnership. After 11 overs Cougars were looking very strong at 67 – 1 and a big total looked on the cards but Sushil stuck twice in the 12th over removing both the set batsmen to put breaks on Cougars run scoring. Grady’s bowlers bowled very tight line and lengths after that to restrict Cougars for 112 – 7 in 20 overs. Rajesh (30), Ashwin (25) and Karthik (22*) were the main scorers. Sushil was the pick of the bowlers with his spell of 4-0-25-3, supported by Aveg with 2 wickets.
Chasing a relatively small total, Grady started attacking from the first ball scoring 14 runs in the first over and were 20 -0 after two overs. A brilliant catch by Kalesh of the bowling of Pavan got Cougars their first wicket but Grady batsmen kept attacking and were 44 – 2 after 7 overs. Swaroop stuck with his first ball of the spell by removing Grady’s key batsmen Vipul with a great yorker and by the 10 over break Cougars had pulled the game back by restricting Grady to 52 – 4 . With 61 required of last ten overs Grady started second half cautiously. Cougars capitalized the situation with some tight bowling and great fielding as the asking rate kept increasing to 9+. Abhishek bowled a great 16th over in power play giving only 1 run and taking one wicket. The same over had Asim run out for 21 which more or less ended any chances Grady had of winning.
Grady were all out for 99 in 20 overs when Pavan took the last wicket starting wild celebrations amongst the Cougars team who became TCC champions for second time in last 5 months .The game had high quality umpiring from Ketan and Sai from Strikers.
The game was followed by a well-organized prize distribution ceremony arranged by TCC and attended by number of friends and family members who had come to support the teams. The presentation party had Venky Rao, founder member and member of Board of Directors of TCC as Chief Guest, TCC Vice President Krishna Shikaram, TCC President Nanda Kumar, member of Board of Directors Surya Saladi and TCC cricket team member Kiran. Jagadish Biradar, organizer of TCC Taped Ball tournament coordinated the presentation ceremony. Venky Rao was presented with a plaque by Surya Saladi for his contribution to cricket in Houston.
Ashwin, the captain of Cougars was presented with the championship trophy and Aveg, the captain of Grady was presented with the runners up trophy. The players of the winners and runners up received individual trophies. Man of the match for the finals was Rajesh from Cougars for a match winning all round performance scoring 30 runs and bowling figures of 4-0-15-2.
Ashwin from Cougars won the Best Batsman trophy for second successive time with 258 runs. Aveg from Grady won the Best Bowler trophy with 14 wickets and Yesu (200 runs and 13 wickets) from HJCC and Vinit (187 runs and 14 wickets) from Chargers Gladiators were declared joint best all-rounders.
Trophies were also given to the man of the match for Semi Finals and Quarter Finals. Karthik from Cougars and Vipul from Grady were the recipients of the man of the match for Semi Finals. Swaroop from Cougars, Satish from HJCC, Aveg from Grady and Subodh from Chargers Gladiators were the recipients of the man of the match for Quarter Finals.
