A cricket match

2 runs to win from 3 balls. Hey! That’s an easy target, just one run away from leveling the score. Wait… but when you have 1 wickets left, and your 11^th batsman is facing his first ball from world’s one of the fastest bowlers? This match can be anyone’s. Well, pretty exciting moment, isn’t it? But still, not very uncommon in cricket history.

At one stage, this was the situation while South Africa was chasing Australia’s BIG total (?) in today’s National Bank series 5th ODI at Johannesburg. But this tells a little about the history making situation. Batting first, top ranked AUSTRALIA SCORED 434 RUNS!!! The highest ever total in cricket history. And now South Africa is about to write their name in this history’s premier position.
The rest of the story is - Ntini managed to get 1 run from the fourth ball of Brat Lee. And Mark Boucher finished rest of the job by hitting a boundary on the next ball, leaving one ball to spare.

I opened the account at blogspot almost three years ago. Since then I was waiting for something extraordinary event to set off writing. The waiting is over… what else can be as exciting as this match of records? Just after the match I called up Arijit (a cricket freak friend of mine) and found Aabir on his other phone. We wanted to be sure he is not fainted. Woooh! I can still feel the excitement.

The records of the match:

• Most runs in first Innings: 434 by Australia against South Africa
• Most runs in an innings: 438 by South Africa against Australia
• Most number of boundaries (fours) in a match: 87 fours
• Most number of over-boundaries (sixes) in a match: 26
• Most expensive bowler: Mick Lewis (Australia) – gave 113 runs in 10 overs.
• Highest ever total runs in ODI (in a day, totaling both teams’ score): 872

South Africa won the series by 3-2. Ricky Ponting (for scoring 161 from 105 balls) and Herschelle Gibbs (for scoring 175 from 111 balls) are jointly declared man of match.