Cricket: Vijay T20 league-Patel Youth trounce Young Stars |06 July 2013

The batsmen were met with very indifferent bowling as the Young Stars bowled short-pitch balls and in saying that, Patel Youth got away with some very unorthodox batting, playing across the line and managing to score freely.

Their three-top of the order batsmen scored well – Naresh 30 and Nithin 13 while Bharat scored a quick fire 56 which was man-of-the-match quality.

Further down the order, Prakash scored 36 runs and helped Patel Youth put on a well-earned and almost unassailable 196 runs.

With the pressure on, Young Stars came out to bat and lost their first wicket in the first over with no runs on the board when Milind was run out for 0. Moving down the batting order with wickets falling regularly, Rangan 11, Dharmesh 11, Patrick 18 and Arka 15 tried to fight back. The scorecard looked pretty bad with 3 run outs, and Paresh taking 2 for 14 in 4 overs and Ajith 2 for 10 in 4, leaving Young Stars all out for 88 runs and losing the game by 108 runs.
Let us hope they fair better this weekend when they play Eden Kings.

Vijay ‘B’ win crunch game against Arctic

On the same day in the afternoon, Vijay ‘B’ played Arctic Turn in a must win game for both teams who were looking to make it to the semifinals.

Vijay ‘B’ won the toss and chose to bat and they scored fairly consistently down the order. Their top scorer was Vinod with 36 runs and the next top run scorer being extras with 30.
The top bowlers for Arctic were Ibrahim with 3 for 18 off 3 overs and Nitish and Dinesh taking 2 a piece.

Vijay ‘B’ set a modest total of 144 making a game of it. In came Arctic to bat with wickets falling early. Vijay ‘B’’s Govind took 3 wickets for 29 off 4, Rajeew 3 wickets for 38 and Mukesh 2 for 26. Bupesh top-scored with 28 and Panday added 17 and they were really the only form of resistance and the team only managed to score 108 runs in 18.5 overs losing the match by 36 runs.

With the points table looking very close, Patel Youth have to win their game this weekend against Vijay ‘A’ to confirm a spot in the semifinals, and they will have to score well to ensure a competitive run rate.

Meanwhile, members of the Lakstars team were privileged to be photographed with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa who was here on a three-day state visit.

The following is the league standings: