Getting away from the cricket side of touring can be fun occasionally, just to break the pressure that develops

Matthew Bell31-Aug-2001Getting away from the cricket side of touring can be fun occasionally, just to break the pressure that develops.With that in mind our social club in India, Chris Nevin, Mark Richardson and myself arranged a Tuktuk (a rickshaw-like thing that seats two passengers and a driver and which is powered by a motor about the size of a lawn mower) race down to the Pizza Corner (like Pizza Hut) establishment about three kilometres down the road from our hotel in Chennai.We were having our usual team meal there after winning our second game in the Buchi Babu tournament.As part of our touring strategy we divided our tour party of 16 into four teams of four. But for this event we were divided into eight pairs after we managed to arrange eight Tuktuk drivers.It was a bit like Le Mans at the start as each of the drivers had to hold up a number which corresponded with one each team had been given. Once you had found your Tuktuk you had to encourage the drivers to get you to the Corner first.This all happened about 7pm which corresponds with peak hour in Chennai and we found ourselves trying to go against the traffic.It got quite scary at times but it was a lot of fun.The eventual winners of the Chennai Tuktuk championship of 2001 were Ashley Ross and Matt Horne. Paul Wiseman and Brooke Walker got themselves into a right spin and were a distant last as the Tuktuk ran out of petrol.We made a disappointing start to our semi-final. We batted first, and poorly, against Indian Railways and were all out for a paltry 129. Mark Richardson batted the entire innings to be 62 not out. The Railways side were 114/4 at stumps but we wrote a script for the next two days, working out what we had to do in the remaining phases of the game.We were inspired by coach Ashley Ross and his vision of a pre-mortem instead of a post-mortem. He believed we could win the game on the last day with three overs to spare. We all brought into the idea.The phases were to bowl the Railways side out in the morning session. Unfortunately, we were not able to achieve this until halfway through the second session which left us exactly 150 runs adrift.The second phase was to boldly go about restoring a lead so that we had enough runs to give ourselves a chance of bowling them out.We ended the day about 60 runs in front but with only four wickets in hand. It was hard work as they used six/three leg-side fields and speared the ball into our pads.This made scoring difficult and the lads improvised very well, adopting the reverse sweep on many occasions. Mark Richardson batted well for a nice double of half centuries and Lou Vincent looked good by stumps on 50 not out.We completed the second phase of our plan 20 overs into the day’s play with Lou Vincent scoring his first century of the tour. It was a fine knock and one that gave us an outside chance of winning as we had a lead of 163.We knew from the first innings that their batsmen did not like the short-pitched bowling. Shane Bond expolited their inability to cope with the short ball in three great spells in which he collected seven for 45 from 14 overs.Shane and Lou were the heroes for us and their efforts, backed up by some brilliant fielding helped us win the match.The script had been played out and we actually won the game just after tea with 40 overs still to spare.It was an astonishing game of cricket and the team showed a lot of character to come from behind and win convincingly in the end.