The Monkeys are Blitzing now - Part 1 : The Birth of 'Beasts'

I will use our blog to describe our cricketing journey from the 'Beasts' in 2007 June to Blitz currently. I am writing this blog from my perspective. The facts I present might be off the mark, and I urge you to correct them. After all, memory is not perfect, and history is written by the winners. This is part 1 of the series.

It was June 2007. I had just landed in the bay area, and wasn't feeling too good about leaving all my friends in Ohio. After all, I had spent 5 winters in Ohio. In Ohio, you get to play cricket only for 3-4 months because of the weather, and I had heard my friends in the bay area boast about the weather here. I was looking forward to a weekend of casual cricket. I was sharing an apartment temporarily with Arul who was my grad school buddy, and asked him one saturday if anybody he knew played cricket. He made a few calls and we decided to leave for the ground in the afternoon. I used to play organized cricket in Cincinnati even thought it was only for 3-4 months, and we usually played with our corporate teams, which meant that the whole setup was very formal. We drove to this park, called Washington park, and I saw 5-6 guys playing cricket there. They were using the end of the baseball ground as the wickets and it was 3 times as wide as our regular stumps. I was first introduced to Arvind (who plays for Dazzlers), and then to our first fast bowler Shireesh Mettapalle. Apart from these 2, I also met the now famous Iris Gujju gang : Hardik, the huge guy, Rushabh, the tall dude, Siddharth the quiet chap, and Akshay the puny one :). There was also GG who was the butt of jokes in that gang. It was a good enough crowd for casual cricket and they went over the rules, and we started playing. Thats when I realized that these guys were all really good. Hardik was especially very agile, and that was something I did not expect. We had a good game of cricket with Kasat and Rushabh hitting the stumps on multiple occasions from various angles, and Hardik swatting every loose ball for a boundary. We met again for cricket a week later and I got to know the gang a little better. I found out that apart from being good cricketers, this was a really fun gang, mainly due to Hardik who always kept things light with some good natured ribbing directed towards GG. We decided to meet regularly on weekends to play cricket, and we played on both days on a few weekends.

Arvind came up with the idea of registering for a 6s tournament called the Bata cup, and he felt that we had a decent team to compete for that tournament. There were 7 of us - Arvind,Shireesh,Hardik,Rushabh,Kasat,Akshay and myself and we decided to use a rotation system to play the games(the birth of rotation!). Arvind registered our team name as 'Beasts', and Monkeys version zero was born. Shireesh was the captain of this team, and he was the first captain of the Monkeys! Kasat pulled out of the tournament due to issues at work, and we roped in Tarun who was here for his internship from USC (Thanks to USC for sending so many quality cricketers our way). Tarun was a hard hitter of the ball, and could clear any boundary. We were confident about a good show in the tournament. As we were unaware of the level of competition in the bay area, we thought we would advance easily. Our first game against FUN 6 was an easy victory with Shireesh taking a hattrick, and Akshay picking up 4 dismissals behind the stumps (this was the birth of our current keeper for blitz). We were elated then, only to walk back dejected 5 hours later, as we lost to the eventual champs, the spartans in the next game. Hardik and Tarun batted really well to get us out of an early mess, and Rushabh bowled his heart out, but in the end we were short. Apart from a minor mishap where Hardik wanted to pummel a particular dude wearing a blue tooth headset, we were reasonably satisfied as we were 1-1 at the end of the day.

This created an interest to play competitive cricket in the bay area. Sunnyvale cric group was formed. Our group grew from 6-7 on the weekends to 20-30 at one point. We got in friends, friends of friends and passersby to play with us. There was this dude, who used to play with us, also got us water bottles for one session, but nobody knew who he was. One fine saturday...

TO BE CONTINUED