SDPL Final :- Eagles v/s Shadows on 01302011

The final was played at 1pm at the Stonebridge Neighborhood Park. Shadows won the toss and elected to bat. The bowling to begin with for the Eagles was impressive. Helped by a sensible partnership between Narsing and Shreedharan Shadows moved to 45 runs in 10 overs and then 95/10 in 19.5 overs. Amit snapped up a hat-trick in over number 19. Mansoor (1), Amit (4), Rupesh (2) and Sam (2) were amongst the wickets. Santosh was spectacular behind the wickets and picked up four batsmen caught, stumped one and featured in a run out dismissal. It was an excellent spell of bowling by all bowlers who rolled their arms on the day. Restricting the opposition to a score of less than 100 in the final was a splendid effort. The batting side disappointed by not getting on to a good start and lost wickets at regular intervals. This in turn increased the pressure on the batting. The top four bowlers bowled extremely well for the Shadows resulting in Eagles trying to go after the bowling in the lookout for runs. Eagles reached a meagre 28/7 in 11 overs. Thereafter a win looked improbable. The fifth and sixth bowler of the Shadows offered scoring opportunities and the final three wickets posted 44 runs for the Eagles. In the end Eagles lost by a significant margin of 23 runs thereby resulting in an anti-climax in the second half of the match. Shadows thus win the tournament with an impressive winning record. The only game they lost was against the Strikers whom they might have met a second time in a semi-final which was forfeited by the Strikers. The Eagles could not maintain consistent form throughout the tournament losing to Strikers, Shadows and Mavericks. The final though was a good fight for the first half of the inning. Steady responsible batting by the top order might have resulted in a good platform for the attacking lower half to capitalize on. Neverthless, the team made it to a final which is a good achievement in itself.

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