Dharik Sanchan

The meet is over. Everything seems to be a lot more relaxed now. No more strenuous sessions of practice. No more nets. All the efforts that went in to making a brilliant team minus our captain (Dharik) resulted in a silver medal and a certificate. Is that what we played for? Does the glory from a silver medal do enough justice to all the pains the man with a broken collar bone took to pull back the team from the drain?

For those who don't get the import of my words, we had moulded ourselves into a beautiful cricket team worthy of wearing the IITM whites, when disaster struck. Our dedicated captain, Dharik Sanchan, broke his collar bone during practice and was ruled out of the tournament.

The vice captain, Ayush, another fighter in the making, did his best to darn the damage, but there was always this gut feeling of an unfilled cavity in the side, atleast for me. Dharik finished his make-up examinations and went with us to Mumbai for the tournament to render moral support. I think he did much more than that and this makes me blog here.

Every match we played was watched by his keen eyes and our first victory against IITG did not make him happy. He proved to be someone who could look into the minuses in a victory. We were given a mouthful that night at the team meeting for the appalling behaviour on and off the field. The next match against IITD saw IITM go down probably like never before. It was then, that the man rose to the occasion. He detected the lack of a left arm orthodox spinner in the team.

The sole left handed medium pacer in the team, a freshie by name Vivek, who had never bowled in a match for IITM before that, was transformed into a spinner in just two days; full credit to Dharik and Vivek for the feat. The latter was very effective in the semi final against IIT Kanpur. All the matches had our former captain patrolling the boundaries asking his players to raise volume levels on the field and offering valuable advice. At times, the match would only be as interesting as digging one's nose, but one look at Dharik and enthusiasm would seep into me.

The eve of the cricket final saw some shameful moments in the history of sportsmanship as every game that IITB played was ably backed by heinous referees. IITM suffered loss after loss and it was left to the cricket team to save its face. The championship had slipped from our hands and the only majesty that we were playing for was gold in cricket. Beating IITD was a bigger motivation and Dharik had asked for nothing more than this. Unfortunately, a team that lacked an ace spinner and batsman in Dharik could not do well yet again and was defeated for the second time in a row by IITD.

Emotions were high and the seven players of the team who apparently were playing their last inter IIT cricket match shed contagious tears. A few good words were exchanged and Dharik only praised the team for fighting its skin out. But that could console none of us. I still feel we haven't done justice to all his efforts. There is no chance we could do it anymore and that makes me feel worse!

Anyway, thanks Dharik. Hats off!

The same applies to all the other members of the team. It was my good fortune playing with them.