It’s not always about winning!

“Baar baar haan, bolo yaar haan
Apni jeet ho, unki haar haan”

With these lines from the Movie “Lagaan” playing in the background on an office Mac, team iXiGO was getting ready for the match against Guavus Network Systems on Friday, 11th February. At 2:30 pm, the team of 11 players marched towards the field with all hopes to win the battle of cricket.

Under the able leadership of our enthusiastic all-rounder captain Abhishek, the whole iXiGO team set out and was already in the winning spirit. After the required assessment and choice of the pitch near Leisure Valley Park, the game of cricket started.
The toss ceremony is always a game of chance, even if you lose, you may get what you wanted and winning might land you at the wrong side. We won the toss and elected to bat first. Fingers crossed as this was a good start.
First ball, no run... Second ball... oh, we lost a wicket... Our opening batsman Pavitar was clean bowled by the fiery delivery of the fast bowler ! But hold on, it doesn’t matter, even Sachin gets out on a Duck sometimes and still Team India goes on to win the match. Buoyed by this thought, we again got our hopes high and carried on with the match! Till this time, we were unaware of the opponent’s blizzardy bowling which we were about to witness in the coming overs.

One by one, our wickets kept falling and our star batsmen fell prey to the really fiery bowling & “Jonty Rhodes” style fielding from the opposite side. Thanks to a last-ditch effort batting partnership between Nitin & Amit, we were able to play through the entire inning of 15 overs, setting a competitive target for the opposite team considering the cold conditions and the unpredictable pitch of Leisure Valley ground, Gurgaon.

Rajnish & Abhishek led the bowling attack for iXiGO and ensured that we kept our hopes alive in the first half of the match. However, our failure to field well to contain the damages caused by the fours, a few dropped catches and our inability to keep taking wickets led to a loss of moral in the team. The other team played stupendously and an array of batting firework ensured that they achieve the target in no time with the loss of a single wicket.

A few lessons were learnt in this game:
1. Fitness is important: Their team was a lot fitter than ours, and caused us to introspect on our individual levels of fitness.
2. Never say die: At heart we had lost half the match even when the first inning was over, since our wickets fell consistently and our score seemed too vulnerable.
3. Teamwork: Every individual’s effort sums up to the team’s performance: Certainly we all felt there was room for improvement in each of our individual cricketing performance at batting, bowling or fielding. If we don’t perform to our own expectations, the team definitely won’t.

Success is never ending, failure is never final, and as Aloke had put it right at the start, “Kuch na hoga to tajurba hoga!”. So we are back from the field with a lot of lessons learnt, but with our “Never say die” attitude, we will continue playing more games. Because, it’s not always about winning !

Here is a sneak peek of this event which was full of fun, frolic, and excitement and despite defeat left the entire iXiGO team rejuvenated!

(Photo credit: Subhro Kar, an avid photographer @iXiGO.com)