Second week of AZTwenty20 saw a few close games and a few one sided ones. While Arizona Warriors (AZW), Tornado Cricket club (TCC), Scottsdale and Chandler Cricket Club (SCCC) and Metro Suns (MSU) came back strongly after their respective first defeats to register their first win of the tournament beating Valley Eagles (VAE), Metro Champs (MCMP), Spartans (SCCC) and Taverners (TAVs) respectively, Intraedge Kings (iKCC), Cavaliers (CAVs) and Metro Stars continued their domination in the second week of the tournament beating Wildcats (WLD), Arizona Cricket Club (ACC) and Kingfishers Kings (KCCK) respectively very comfortably.

For the detailed schedule and Results of the games, please visit the official website of AZTwenty20.

Brief Scorecards from Week-2 Games: Please click on the links for detailed information.

          Picture of the week: Arizona Warriors Team

Game of the WEEK:

This week saw more close games than the last week. It is hard to pick one such game and hence two games would win this contest this week.

Game 16: PCC Vs CTS @ Cave Creek Park: Team from the Cognizant Software Solutions, batting first could not repeat its batting miracles of last weekend against the Cavaliers and folded for a small total of 88 runs. Apart from the openers Ravikanth (19), Manoj Kanithi (18) and the Captain Sarvesh karra (14), no other batsman reached double digits. Hitesh Patel was the best bowler for PCC claiming 4/8.

However CTS came back strongly in the second innings and PCC had to work very hard to get those runs and at the end PCC managed it only with the last pairing fighting it out. The veteran Gregory Caracciolo (22* runs) was the one who guided them home. CTS bowlers were very discipline but probably they didn’t had enough on the board to sneak a win.

Game 14: Spartans Vs SCCC @ Washington (E) : Having managed a comfortable win against the Metro Suns last weekend,  Spartans were well on course to achieve the target of 112 which SCCC managed thanks mainly to Vaibhav Dixit (21 off 29) and Ramanarayan Santharam (28 off 19), but lost their ways towards the end despite a good top order start that included Nemil Gajjar (29), Mahendran Ganeshan (14) and Sundarrajan Balasubramanian (19). While SCCC will be delighted to win their first game after their loss to TAVs last weekend, Spartans would be disappointed to lose a game they should have won easily when they needed around 14 runs in the last 4 overs.

Batsmen of the Week:

1. Ajay Bhatia (Cavaliers): His bulldozing 72 undefeated runs that included 10 hits to the fence and 3 towering sixes were probably too intimidating for ACC as ACC folded out for only 40 runs during the chase of 190 runs.
2. Vasanth Jayaraman (Intraedge Kings): His 56 undefeated runs off only 39 balls including 10 hits to the fence of which four were beautifully and fiercely hit cover drives made the chase of 103 runs really a short and a quick one.

Bowlers of the Week:

1. Abul Alam (Arizona Warriors): His super economical and productive figures (3.4-0-6-3) were instrumental in taking his team to the first win. Probably a superb captain’s effort.
2. Anil Sankar (Cavaliers): His 4-2-6-3 did so much damage to ACC that they folded out for the lowest total of the tournament so far.
3. Sandeep Chaoudhary (TCC): His 5/16 shut the door for Metro Champs completely.
4. Ramesh Reddy (Metro Suns): His 10/3 was instrumental in restricting TAVs to 124 chasing 168.
5. Hitesh Patel (PCC Cosmos): The importance of his miserly spell (4-0-8-4) could be realized by the fact that PCC ended up winning this game by only 1 wicket.

Trivia:

1. The winning margin of 148 runs for CAVs against the ACC was the highest so far in the AZTwenty20 2009.
2. Sandeep Choudhary’s 5/16 was the first and the only 5 wicket haul so far in this tournament. However there have been four occurrences of 4 wickets hauls so far.
3. A total of 1797 runs at an average of 5.73 runs per over were scored for the loss of 138 wickets in total.

Points Table: While Cavaliers, Metro Stars, Intraedge Kingfishers and Taverners continue to top the respective groups, the Red-2 group has become most interesting with every team winning one game and securing 2 points each. This weekend will see the end of inter group game and from the following weekend the intra group games will start which is the second round of the tournament. Please click here to see the points table and the positions of the teams in the respective group.