It was an action-packed weekend in the Advanced Offshore JCA cricket league with five games being played across three grounds. Bowlers exerted their dominance with a four-wicket over including a hat trick to Amar Kapadia and a fiver in a losing cause to Fernandes Nato. Low scores dominated and it was not a great weekend to be batting first.

Defending champions Yadavas Chairos Tigers squared off against seven-time champions WISCI Wanderers in the marquee clash of the weekend at the Cibubur cricket ground. WISCI won the toss and were off to a breezy start courtesy of their openers Naresh Gupta and Aman Singh. Ahmad Raihan’s double-strike in the 11th over brought the Tigers back into the game but Rajeev Rajeswaran consolidated along with Aman with a 60-run stand.

The see-sawing fortunes continued as Tigers skipper Fernandes Nato claimed four quick wickets in the space of three overs to lead a fight-back but the young Danilson Hawoe showed a lot of grit with a late order 29-run knock to take WISCI to a strong score of 221 runs in their 40 overs.

The chase did not start well for the Tigers with Deepak Singh knocking over Anjar Tadarus in the second over. Gamantika and Muhaddis tried to rebuild but the WISCI bowlers kept chipping away as David Holme and Danilson Hawoe accounted for the Tigers top order with just 52 on the board. The rest of the batting too could not put up a fight and were bowled out for a paltry 101 on the board.

Senayan CC took on Rawamangun CC (RCC) in the second 40-over game of the week and the Senayan opening bowlers David Surjit and Maneesh Dubey immediately got stuck into the RCC batting accounting for their top order in quick time. Amar Kapadia continued his dream run in this season with a breath-taking first over where he took four wickets including a hat trick to reduce RCC to a woeful 44 for eight. Amar had earlier in his first game of the season also bowled a first over with three wickets. Sombit Deb then took two wickets of his first over as RCC was bundled out for just 50 runs.

In the chase, Desandri Saputra took a couple of quick wickets to give a glimmer of hope to his side, which was quickly extinguished by a quick unbeaten 29 by Jagadesh Prasad making his JCA debut. Senayan CC won by seven wickets in the 13th over.

WPP India XI traveled to Purwakarta to play against Indorama CC in the final 40-over game of the weekend. A familiar pattern followed as Indorama CC was quickly reduced to 19 for three after choosing to bat first and Rohit Khatana was the destroyer this time. The India XI veteran, Kishore Gunwani, returning to active cricket after a long break was in excellent form with an economical spell of just 12 runs in eight overs.

Nitin Joshi and Abhishek Sharma battled well to rebuild the innings but Santosh Kumar with a four-wicket haul and Dhiraj Nagpal with two wickets kept the pressure up as Indorama CC was bowled out for 116 runs. In reply, Aman Sinha and Santosh Kumar were in solid reconstruction mode after the loss of the openers cheaply, when the skies opened up forcing the game to be stopped after 16 overs with WPP India XI well ahead of the DLS par score and hence, declared winner.

NTT Cricket Club chose to bowl first in its T20 game against OECL Ceylon CC at the GMIS cricket ground and Baba Sivasankaran with the help of Vishnu Kumar had set up a decent platform at 68 for three in the 11th over. The next seven wickets, however, fell for just 21 runs as Pradeep Patnaik and Vishal Hirgude bowled well to bowl out OECL Ceylon for just 89 runs.

Gufran Khan set up the chase well and Palwinder Singh finished things off with a six as NTT Cricket club chased down the target with seven wickets in hand. The second T20 game of the weekend between Yadavas Chairos Tigers and GM Jaguar XI was washed out without the possibility of a result.

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