It was a competition of gripping contests, but MI New York’s stunning run through the playoffs and Pooran’s unbeaten 55-ball 137 in the final put everything else to shade

Ashish Pant31-Jul-20234:28

Pooran’s magnificent 137* takes MI NY to MLC title

Can’t stop watching @nicholaspooran’s sixes he hit today‼️ #MLC2023 #MLCFINAL pic.twitter.com/OynKTi2xnD

— Major League Cricket (@MLCricket) July 31, 2023

At the end of the second week, Patriots were the only team without a win and they’ve also lost Linde to concussion

Rvel Zahid28-Aug-2023Irshad-Amir duo hogs the limelightSalman Irshad gave Jamaica Tallawahs an early advantage by picking up three wickets in an over and nearly got a hat-trick against St Kitts & Nevis Patriots. He also registered his career-best figures of 4 for 27 in T20s. First, he got Andre Fletcher poking at a snorter outside off to the keeper and then dismissed Corbin Bosch, who spooned the ball to backward point. Irshad then dismissed Ambati Rayudu for a duck in his first CPL innings. His final wicket came off a teasing delivery that lured Joshua Da Silva into playing a false shot.Mohammad Amir was among the wickets too, giving Tallawahs a rich Pakistan flavour along with Imad Wasim who smashed 63 off 36 balls against in Tallawahs’ next game against Guyana Amazon Warriors.Warriors open accountAfter their first match was washed out, Amazon Warriors started the week with a bang against Patriots, with Saim Ayub scoring a breezy 31. His no-look shot lit up the PSL, but he got out to that shot in the CPL as he exposed his leg stump a bit too much and saw his stumps getting flattened. Shai Hope then laid the foundation for an above-par score with a fluent fifty. Shimron Hetmyer, Keemo Paul and Romario Shepherd all pitched in with cameos to lift Amazon Warriors to 197 for 7.Related

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In the second innings, it was Amazon Warriors’ spin duo of Gudakesh Motie and Imran Tahir who inflicted the most damage. Tahir picked up two wickets, including that of Sherfane Rutherford, to help Amazon Warriors dismiss Patriots for 132. The 44-year-old South African is still so good. He must have some sort of deal in place with his telomeres to slow down the ageing process.In the same game, George Linde suffered a collision after colliding with Andre Fletcher, with Kofi James coming in as a concussion sub. James could only manage seven off four balls in the chase. Patriots also have to deal with another change, with Rutherford taking over as captain from Evin Lewis.Former Knight Rider Pierre spins out Knight RidersFaf du Plessis slammed an authoritative half-century for St Lucia Kings against Trinbago Knight Riders. Once he fell, Sikandar Raza, who will succeed du Plessis as captain, didn’t let the scoring rate decelerate much and raced to 32 to help Kings post 167 on a two-paced track that had plenty of assistance for the spinners. In reply, Knight Riders lost Martin Guptill, Chadwick Walton and Nicholas Pooran in the powerplay. Kieron Pollard briefly rescused the chase, but Knight Riders folded for 113 inside 15 overs, with former Knight Rider Khary Pierre taking four wickets. Overall, Kings’ spinners combined to take nine wickets which is the most by a team’s spinners in a CPL match.George Linde suffered a concussion after colliding with Andre Fletcher•CPL T20 via Getty ImagesPatriots yet to get off the markPatriots’ Fletcher clobbered some mighty hits in the powerplay against Barbados Royals but he was not comfortable against Qais Ahmad. The Afghanistan legspinner turned the ball sharply and ended with excellent figures of 4-0-16-2. Nyeem Young bowled well until he was shouldered with the responsibility of the last over, in which he conceded 34 runs before he was taken out of the attack for bowling two no-balls. Bosch and Drakes stitched together an unbroken 54 off 18 balls for the seventh wicket to take Patriots to 197.The chase started with Rahkeem Cornwall hitting a 15-ball 38 which set the template for the team. Royals lost some wickets in the middle but Rovman Powell’s unbeaten 67 and his 74-run partnership off just 35 balls with Alick Athanaze put them back on the path to victory.Patriots also lost their next match to Knight Riders on Sunday, registering their fourth successive defeat in six games. They are only team without a win this season.Hetmyer, Paul, Shepherd sparkleOn Sunday, Amazon Warriors roared back into the contest against Tallawahs, after being three down in four overs, thanks to Keemo Paul and Shimron Hetmyer. Paul went berserk, notching up his fifty in 23 balls and putting on a 99-run partnership while Hetmyer top-scored with 60 off 45. The duo took the total to 210 – the second most runs scored after the fall of the third wicket in a CPL innings.Tallawahs also had a shaky start, losing their top four for 13 runs. Wasim breathed some life into the chase with 63 off 36 while Fabian Allen hit 47 off 25. However, despite the late blows, irreparable damage had already been done.Romario Shepherd was the pick of the bowlers, snaring three vital wickets for seven runs in his three overs. Junior Sinclair chipped in with two wickets in his three overs. It was the first time 300-plus runs were scored by the players batting at No.5 and lower, the highest for any T20 game. The match also witnessed more than 350 runs being scored after the fall of the third wicket – the highest for a T20 match.

South Africa got it right just once in three games, and their biggest positive from the series was on display in that match – Tony de Zorzi

Firdose Moonda22-Dec-20234:51

Will the century revive Samson’s international career?

Sanju Samson can flex, and he did when he reached his first ODI hundred – a dozen years since making his debut for Kerala in domestic cricket, but only 16 ODIs into his international career. He doesn’t lack talent – but hasn’t always had a lot of opportunities – and with a bend of his elbow and a gesture to his bicep, Samson indicated that he still had strength to keep going; and his team-mates agreed.”He has been a phenomenal performer over the years, and hasn’t gotten enough chances for different reasons,” India’s captain KL Rahul told the host broadcaster at the post-match presentation. “There are world-class players [in the Indian side]. Given this opportunity, he capitalised.”As an IPL and a domestic-cricket regular, Samson’s skillset is fairly well-known to followers of Indian cricket: play aggressively from the get-go, and don’t slow down. And that has also been the story of his brief international career. Before Thursday, Samson had played 15 ODIs, scored 402 runs, including three half-centuries, at an average of 50.25, albeit magnified by five not outs.Related

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In ten of those innings, he batted at No. 5 or 6, though he has spent the bulk of his domestic career at No. 3. So Rahul is right in that limited scope to use Samson in places where he is most effective may have impacted his numbers and performances. But in Paarl, that changed.Samson was carded to bat at No. 3 and was called on in the fifth over, which meant he had most of the innings to show what he could do. With time on his side, he was patient, and he read conditions and circumstances well. His first three boundaries relied on timing rather than power, and came in the space of 22 balls – an indication that he was not going to go after settling down.”I think that’s the trick,” he said as he accepted his Player-of-the-Match award. “This format gives you some extra time to understand the wicket, [and] understand the bowler. It gives you an extra ten or 20 balls to figure things out.”He brought up India’s hundred in the 19th over, which was also when Rahul was dismissed, and Tilak Varma, playing in his fourth ODI, came to the crease. At that stage, the innings needed consolidating, and despite their lack of international inexperience, Samson and Tilak rebuilt. They went ten overs without scoring a boundary, and Keshav Maharaj bowled four of them.”As the ball got old, it got a bit slower,” Samson said. “When KL got out, we had a momentum shift, and Maharaj bowled really well.”But Samson and Tilak got through that period. Tilak hit his first four in 39 balls when he slogged Beuran Hendricks to deep midwicket in the 30th over, and things started to open up but not entirely. It was only in the 40th over that Samson and Tilak “decided to go a bit harder,” as Samson put it; and it was Samson himself who got that started.”This format gives you some extra time to understand the wicket, [and] understand the bowler” – Sanju Samson•Associated PressHe pulled Nandre Burger on to the grass banks to start a ten-over period in which India scored 93 runs, and up his own scoring rate, which had hovered in the 60s throughout the innings. After working his way to 50 off 66 balls, 64 off 90 balls and 86 off 101, Samson scored 22 runs off the last 13 balls he faced – a reminder of old, maybe, and a nod to the potential he has always had, and which, some will say, has remained unfulfilled.”Really interesting and emotional,” was how he described the feeling of reaching an ODI century in the immediate aftermath. “I have been putting in a lot of work always.”And he showed that with his celebration. His strong-man display could be interpreted as an indication that he has been exercising his muscles – and his mind – and has played some small part in helping the team move on from the disappointment of losing the World Cup final.De Zorzi is a glimpse into South Africa’s futureNo one can ever equate a series win in South Africa – even though it is only India’s second – to the feeling of winning a tournament; and no-one needs to. Fifty-over cricket was the centre of this sport’s world at the World Cup, but it will take a backseat over the next year. And that’s also why South Africa could afford to be “maybe a bit pap [soft] after a World Cup,” as stand-in captain Aiden Markram put it at the post-match press conference.”Guys put everything on the line, and we didn’t achieve what we wanted to,” he said.And so, maybe, they are a little spent. But the concerns that cropped up in that campaign were brought home: do they always make the right decisions at the toss, and can they chase confidently?Tony de Zorzi knocked off a half-century in 54 balls in the last ODI•AFP/Getty ImagesIn the first ODI, Markram opted to bat in bowler-friendly conditions at the Wanderers, and South Africa were shot out for 116 inside 28 overs.Then he chose to bowl first in 35-degree heat in Paarl, where his attack conceded 296.He was adamant that neither of those were decisions he regretted, and the defeats that came from both were down to a lack of execution and application.It’s worth remembering, though, that in the middle of those two results, he got it right. In Gqeberha, Markram put India in, South Africa restricted them to 211 and won by eight wickets. Their biggest positive from the series was on display in that match.”Tony de Zorzi is the stand out. He played the type of cricket that we are looking for,” white-ball coach Rob Walter said at the post-match press conference.A century in his fourth ODI, and 81 off 87 in his fifth, saw de Zorzi finish as the leading run-scorer in the series, by more than 100 runs from his nearest rival – B Sai Sudharsan. At a time when the future of South Africa cricket, especially their white-ball outfits given that seven of their ODI World Cup squad are over the age of 30, is up for discussion, de Zorzi is a glimpse into the future.Like India, South Africa will only turn their attention to fifty-over cricket midway at some point after the T20 World Cup next year; but when they do, both teams have players to peg their batting blueprints on. If anything came out of this contest, that has to be it.

A World Cup semi-final is the kind of thing he had dreamed about while playing backyard games with his brother Dale, who is also a first-class cricketer

Alagappan Muthu and Deivarayan Muthu14-Nov-2023Glenn Phillips wasn’t going to make it.He began life as a professional cricketer batting right at the top of the order but, by his own admission, he wasn’t doing enough to dislodge the openers New Zealand already had. Very few could match up to what Martin Guptill provided at the time, which is why in 340 of the 367 times he put on the Black Cap, he was also out there dealing with the first ball.”I wasn’t playing nearly consistently enough to push somebody out of their position,” Phillips told ESPNcricinfo on Monday as he reflected on the path that has brought him to a World Cup semi-final.Glenn’s brother Dale, currently watching from afar, still can’t believe any of this is real. They used to be absolute menaces, pretending the cutlery they had in their hands at the dinner table were cricket bats instead. They played together for New Zealand at the Under-19 level and they hope to play together again, following in the footsteps of the McCullums and the Marshalls.Related

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“We were always very competitive in the backyard when we were growing up,” Dale said. “The goal was always there to play big games at a World Cup. Especially for Glenn to be where he has got to now… It was more of a dream as opposed to thinking it would become a reality. I don’t think either of us imagined where he would be right now. It’s pretty cool to see that one of those dreams has come true.”

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He has the backing of the Bangladesh head coach, but lack of game time in domestic cricket will be a hurdle he’ll have to overcome

Mohammad Isam07-Mar-2024Rishad Hossain is one of a rare and endangered species in Bangladesh – a legspinner.Even as other countries have embraced legspinners for decades and developed them into potent weapons across formats, Bangladesh has largely ignored them, even in domestic cricket where left and right-arm orthodox spinners are preferred. It’s because of the widespread perception among the country’s officials, coaches and captains that legspinners are expensive in limited-overs cricket. Young leggies are advised to switch to offspin or to concentrate on batting. Dhaka clubs and first-class teams will shun you otherwise, they are told.So Rishad, a lanky 21-year old from the country’s northernmost region Rangpur, has made it to where few legspinners have got to before. He played the first two T20Is of the ongoing series against Sri Lanka, was consistent with his lengths, got hit a few times, and took a wicket. Nothing remarkable.He had begun well in the first game in Sylhet before conceding 18 in his third over. It should have been the end of his spell but his captain Najmul Hossain Shanto brought Rishad back in the 15th over. A brave move considering Rishad’s lack of cricket this season; in fact he’s played only 52 competitive matches in the last six years. He dismissed Kusal Mendis, beating him with flight and having him caught at long-off, and ended with 1 for 32 in four overs.In the second T20I, Shanto bowled Rishad in three single-over spells. He conceded only one six and one four on a very good batting pitch. “His length has improved a lot,” Shanto said about Rishad. “He can bowl more consistently now. He is working on his variation too. He can bowl better if he continues in this vein.”Related

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Shanto, however, worries for Rishad, who is unlikely to play a lot of games in the upcoming Dhaka Premier League. It is considered Bangladesh’s most important domestic tournament and Rishad has played only five matches in its last five seasons. He is supposed to represent defending champions Abahani Limited, who used him in two games last year.

“I have been involved in building two world-class legspinners: Adam Zampa and Tanveer Sangha. I know how much investment went towards their careers. When I saw Zampa in 2011, he was just another player. He turned out to be world-class. We don’t understand the value of a legspinner here. We are suffering because of that”Chandika Hathurusinghe

“I think it is quite difficult for him. He doesn’t get to play a lot of domestic matches,” Shanto said. “It is unfortunate that teams don’t use him. We don’t know why that happens. He has bowled well in all of his international matches. He has done well against really good batters. He prepares himself quite well. He tries to execute the plans we give him. I am hopeful that he gets a bit more domestic cricket under his belt.”Despite his lack of opportunities in domestic cricket, Rishad has played ten international games since his debut in March last year. He’s taken four wickets in seven T20I innings with an economy rate of 7.00, and gone wicketless in 12.2 overs in his two ODIs so far. His chances have coincided with the return of Chandika Hathurusinghe as Bangladesh’s head coach. Hathurusinghe is the only person in Bangladesh cricket who has genuinely supported legspin.In the first year of his first stint as Bangladesh coach in 2014, Hathurusinghe gave a Test debut to the little-known Jubair Hossain. Hathurusinghe had spotted Jubair in the Bangladesh nets a few months after his appointment as head coach. He was soon making his first-class debut for Bangladesh A against Zimbabwe A, and a Test debut came a few weeks later.Hathurusinghe had fought in vain with chief selector Faruque Ahmed to pick Jubair for the 2015 ODI World Cup. He was considered too inexperienced for such an important campaign. It was also felt that some local coaches were shunning Jubair because Hathurusinghe was so insistent on the legspinner. Jubair didn’t play international cricket for much longer and his domestic presence has been minimal over the years. Before Jubair, there was Alok Kapali, who took 31 international wickets including a hat-trick, but he was always considered a part-time bowler.Rishad Hossain is likely to get more opportunities for Bangladesh•BCBIn a recent interview, Hathurusinghe said legspinners were of tremendous value in international cricket.”I have spoken to the people who matter,” Hathurusinghe said. “Not only this time, the previous time [when he was coach] as well. Sometimes when those things haven’t happened, I have had to take an unconventional route. As you know, Jubair played Tests without playing much first-class cricket. Rishad has also been fast-tracked, but coaches and captains need to understand the value of legspinners. How to use legspinners.”We need to have systems in place to identify the proper pathway for them. I have been involved in building two world-class legspinners: Adam Zampa and Tanveer Sangha. I know how much investment went towards their careers. When I saw Zampa in 2011, he was just another player. He turned out to be world class. We don’t understand the value of a legspinner here. We are suffering because of that.”Rishad has played five first-class matches this season and four games in the BPL. He took a four-wicket haul in his first outing for Comilla Victorians but found himself out of the XI at the business end of the tournament. “Rishad is one for the future,” Hathurusinghe said. “I am really trying to back him as much as we can. Unfortunately we are not getting enough support from local cricket. He is not even playing the BPL. I am very disappointed with that.”There are only a few legspinners in the Bangladesh cricket ecosystem at present. Aminul Islam, who played ten T20Is between 2019 and 2021 as a bowler, generally plays domestic cricket as a batter these days. Wasi Siddiquee was an exciting prospect for a while last year but didn’t play any matches in the 2024 Under-19 World Cup in January. Mehedi Hasan Sohag and Jehadul Hoque made List A debuts this season but they didn’t bowl enough to make any impact.Rishad is likely to play a few more international matches this season. He is in the limited-overs squads against Sri Lanka, and will get a fair chance as long as Hathurusinghe is around. But the wider question remains: will he be given chances to develop in domestic cricket and is there a future for legspin in Bangladesh?

They have done it before but will have to do it with a shuffling batting order finding its feet

Karthik Krishnaswamy12-Feb-20241:33

Can the Vizag pitch be replicated in other Indian venues?

R Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel, Kuldeep Yadav.Jack Leach, Rehan Ahmed, Tom Hartley, Shoaib Bashir, Joe Root.One of these spin attacks began this India-England series with 849 wickets at a combined average of 23.35, and the other with 191 wickets at 36.83.Two Tests into the series, one of them has taken 33 wickets at 33.90, and the other 23 at 38.39.It’s one thing that the averages are as close to each other as they are, given how brutally India’s spinners had outperformed their opposite numbers over their decade of home dominance leading into this series. It’s another thing entirely that those averages are the wrong way round.There’s reason to believe, too, that luck has contributed significantly to England’s returns so far. Where India’s batters have achieved a significantly better control percentage against spin than their England counterparts, their errors have cost them a lot more often. Roughly one in eight false shots from India’s batters has cost them their wicket, while England’s batters have survived 12 false shots per dismissal on average.Luck tends to even out over long series, but so far in this one, it has felt like India have contributed to their own misfortune, failing to turn their control into dominant positions.On day two in Hyderabad, a string of their batters were out to attacking shots against spin, with none of their top five falling to the traditional modes of dismissal: bowled, lbw, caught by keeper, slips or bat-pad. It was a passage of play that Rahul Dravid, India’s head coach, singled out as critical to their failure to convert a dominant position into one from which they could not lose. India’s first-innings lead of 190 was a tall order to overturn, but not one immune to a once-in-a-lifetime innings from Ollie Pope.Related

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“I thought we left probably 70 runs on the board in the first innings,” Dravid said. “You know, I think in our first innings, when conditions were pretty good to bat in on day two, I thought in the kinds of situations we got ourselves into, some good starts and we didn’t really capitalise. We didn’t get a hundred, you know, we didn’t get somebody getting a really big hundred for us. So, in some ways, in India, I just felt we left those 70-80 runs back in the hut in the first innings.”The feeling that India were leaving scorable runs unscored persisted into the second Test in Visakhapatnam. Five of their top six got past 20 in their first innings, and one of them scored a double-hundred, but their total fell just short of 400. In the second innings, India were at one point 354 ahead with six wickets in hand, but the target they set England fell, once again, just short of 400.Both innings were peppered with strange, hard-to-diagnose dismissals. In the first innings, Rohit Sharma glanced an offbreak straight into the lap of leg slip, and Axar and KS Bharat hit uppish square cuts straight to backward point. Shubman Gill gloved a reverse-sweep soon after reaching his hundred in the second innings, and Bharat pulled a long-hop straight into midwicket’s hands. On that Visakhapatnam pitch, spinners occasionally got the ball to stop and bounce awkwardly, so all those shots came with a certain amount of room for things to go wrong. Individually, it was hard to say whether the batters chose the wrong shot or executed the right shot poorly or happened to get that one ball that turned or bounced just that little bit more. Collectively, they added up to a picture of a line-up failing to cash in against a not-particularly-threatening attack, and failing to bat their opposition out of the game, for the second time in a row.1:13

Manjrekar: ‘India can’t expect Bumrah to bail them out’

It cost India a Test match in Hyderabad, and without Jasprit Bumrah doing Jasprit Bumrah things, who knows what could have happened in Visakhapatnam.It can happen when a batting line-up loses experienced heads. Virat Kohli is out of the entire series, and India seem to have moved on fully from Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane. They began the series with a top six of whom only three had played more than 30 Tests, and two of these three – KL Rahul and Jadeja – missed the second Test with injuries. Even the more experienced batters who have featured in this series are getting used to new roles: Gill and Rahul are still new to the middle order, and Axar in Visakhapatnam was designated to bat in the top six for the first timeMost of these players, meanwhile, are white-ball regulars, so the only red-ball cricket they have played in recent months is the Test series at the turn of the year in South Africa – a series played on extravagantly seam-friendly pitches where they didn’t face a single ball of spin. It isn’t surprising then, that these batters have seemed a little rusty when it’s come to milking inexperienced spinners for session after session, keeping the runs flowing steadily while keeping certain risks – hitting the ball in the air, sweeping from the line of the stumps – to a minimum.It’s a skill that viewers often take for granted when they watch Indian batters, but it needs constant polishing like every other skill. India are no doubt working assiduously on it in the lead-up to the third Test in Rajkot, hoping that their batters can do their bit to restore the balance of power between the two spin attacks.

He had moved to the country to pursue a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, but has now become part of USA cricket’s folklore

Shashank Kishore07-Jun-20241:19

Jaffer: Saurabh Netravalkar’s got a great story

In 2010, Saurabh Netravalkar endured heartbreak against Pakistan in the quarter-final of the Under-19 World Cup in Christchurch. Babar Azam was in the opponent’s camp that day, as Pakistan pipped India by two wickets in a rain-affected thriller.Fourteen years later, he had the opportunity to win for his new country, the USA, a T20 World Cup game against Pakistan. Tasked to bowl the Super Over, Netravalkar defended 18 as USA recorded a famous win that gives them a great chance of securing an entry into the Super Eights.If they do – they still have two more games against Ireland and India – Netravalkar may have to extend his official leave at his day job, which is set to end on June 17, by a couple of weeks at the very least. It’s likely he will never have to explain to his American colleagues the reason for it.Related

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All he will need to do is direct them to one of the many Instagram reels that have already popped up about this geeky Indian guy who moved to the USA to pursue a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering but has now become part of USA cricket’s folklore.Netravalkar, 32, harboured the dream of playing for India for the longest time. He was a bristling left-arm quick who rattled Yuvraj Singh’s stumps at the NCA in Bengaluru way back in 2009 while on Air India’s sports scholarship. The next thing he knew was that delivery had earned him a ticket to play in the then-prestigious BCCI Corporate Trophy.He was suddenly sharing a dressing room with Yuvraj, Suresh Raina and Robin Uthappa, all India stars by then. A certain Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni were among those in the opponent camp. Netravalkar, not yet 18 then, finished the tournament as the joint-highest wicket-taker and was on the plane with the Indian team for the Under-19 World Cup, alongside the likes of KL Rahul, Mayank Agarwal, Jaydev Unadkat, Mandeep Singh and Harshal Patel.Playing in that tournament meant missing the entire first semester exams of his Computer Engineering degree that he had enrolled for six months earlier. That was the first big call he had needed to make in his cricket career.Netravalkar had hoped his performance in the World Cup – he was India’s highest wicket-taker in the competition – would pave the way for a berth in the senior Mumbai set-up, and perhaps even an IPL contract. The opportunities for Mumbai were few and far between, with Ajit Agarkar, Zaheer Khan, Aavishkar Salvi and a young Dhawal Kulkarni making it difficult for the youngster to break in.Netravalkar finally made his Ranji Trophy debut in 2013. Incidentally, he had just made another tough call only a few months earlier. He had given up a job as a software testing engineer in Pune to go all-in on cricket for the next two years.But being in and out of the set-up even after two years pushed him to make another call when he received an offer for admission from Cornell University in New York in August 2015. His strong academic credentials and keen interest in cricket, which helped him develop a player-analysis app CricDecode, had earned him a scholarship.As he finished graduate school, Netravalkar was offered a job by Oracle in San Francisco. Having moved to the country without his cricket kit, Netravalkar began playing recreational cricket on the weekends as a way to “fit in with the Indian community”.In 2016, he represented the North West Region at the USACA National Championship. He kicked his efforts into high gear, seeking out as many opportunities to play as possible when the ICC lowered their minimum residency for eligibility from four years to three.Saurabh Netravalkar and his family are delighted after USA’s historic win•ICC/Getty ImagesA sensational spell for Southern California Cricket Association XI against a USA XI in a national-team warm-up match in the summer of 2017 impressed then-coach Pubudu Dassanayake. In January 2018, he made his List A debut for USA, taking 2 for 45 against Leeward Islands. It was as if the life had come full circle.Today, Netravalkar is among a few USA national team players who are regulars in Major League Cricket. Last year, he was the third-highest wicket-taker for Washington Freedom at the inaugural edition, which included a sensational 6 for 9 against a San Francisco Unicorns side boasting the likes of Matthew Wade, Marcus Stoinis and Shadab Khan. He would soon bowl to Shadab again: the final ball of the Super Over on Thursday to clinch the win for USA.Next week, Netravalkar will play against Rohit Sharma, his senior in Mumbai cricket at one point. He will also renew rivalries with Kohli, who he tussled with all those years ago. He wouldn’t need to prove to anybody anymore what playing cricket means. He will have videos of him bowling to cricketing royalty to show for it.