RUN-CRAZY Raju Mazumder unleashed the beast within – but couldn’t stop The Road signing off 2010 with a loss.
The spin king confounded his critics to smash a career-best 18 out of an impressive 79-run partnership with big-hitting Giles Fagan.
In the Orange Caps’ historic 50th match, Giles top scored against the Croydon Tigers smacking a sublime half-century.
But it was Raj, not normally known for his attacking instincts, who took the plaudits for an unlikely knock as he banished the demons of a shocking run of ducks last year.
The regular tail-ender hit two fours in an epic knock that helped get King’s Road’s run chase off to a solid start.
It was exactly what stand-in skip Jamie Keating had stuck him in to open for.
However, chasing a daunting 235 and needing more than a run a ball for 35 overs, The Road were always facing an uphill battle.
And Raj and Giles’s opening stand wasn’t quite enough to stop them buckling under the pressure and collapsing to a 76-run loss.
Despite this though Jamie, The Road’s youngest ever skip, can take heart from a battling all-round performance at Merton’s King George’s Playing Fields.
Put into field first on a damp pitch, the boys from Battersea found wickets hard to come by early on despite bowling well.
Solid batting from the Tigers took them to nearly 50 before Richard Peralta made the breakthrough bouncing a ball off his belly to take a sharp catch off his own bowling.
Even after that runs continued to flow – yet the Orange Caps didn’t allow them to completely run away with it though. The Road chipped away at the batting order as wickets fell at regular – yet expensive – intervals.
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Kevin Pittaway was rewarded with a wicket caught spectacularly by Sham DeSilva before Dan Sherman, Jamie, Jamie Pritchard and newboy Yaz Aziz each got in on the action.
However, all the Tigers’ batsmen got into double figures and scored at more than a run a ball. Only the wicketless Leon Watson managed to keep a lid on it with six accurate overs.
In the closing overs Rich bagged another and Kev picked up two more to leave the two openers with figures of 2 for 44 off 7 and 3 for 41 off 7 respectively.
It left The Road needing a mammoth 236 to win, a feat never before achieved by the side’s fragile batting line-up, on what was a brilliant batting pitch.
And when Raj and Giles’s solid stand was broken the writing was on the wall. Giles fell with the score on 93 and by that time there was little hope of keeping up with run rate needed.
Both Sham, with 15, Leon, with 14, and then Rich, 10, looked comfortable at the crease but fell trying to up the run rate.
And after that the domino effect really started to kick in. Dan, 2, and Jamie, 0, went in successive balls with the stand in skip caught out slogging first ball for a golden duck.
Yaz was run out after a mix-up in the middle as Pritch tried to push for a quick run and Amir Alipour-Mehraban got the second golden duck of the day.
By the time Pritch and Kev launched a futile late last wicket flurry there was no chance The Road could catch up and the pair were just playing out the last moments of their team’s season.
It meant The Road end 2010 with yet another defeat – and their end of season record stands at two wins, no draws or ties and 17 loses.
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