Dubai: Titans team played like champions and lived up to their name to emerge as the champions of the Dubai Cricket Council’s (DCC) Evolve Under-16 Youth League at the Dubai International Stadium.
Speaking to Gulf News about the success of the four-team event, Shiva Pagarani of DCC said: “This tournament was the brainchild of DCC secretary Amin Farooq to boost grassroots cricket and it has turned out to be one of the best junior tournaments the council has hosted.”
Farooq has announced that the council will now host more age-group tournaments where under-19 and under-16 boys can compete together regularly at least four times in an year. The architect of Titans’ win was Krish Bandivdekar, who produced a five-wicket spell to help his team beat Spartans by 30 runs.
Titans did not start off well with their opener and consistent batsman Ahaan Fernandez faced only one ball. Siddanth Agarwal and Aakash Radhakrishnan put on a 84-run partnership to lift Titans out of trouble. Siddanth hit five fours in his knock of 55 runs while Aakash hit a six and five fours during his innings of 43 runs from 41 balls.
Shival Bawa (18) and Vinayak Vijayan (10) made valuable contributions but the total got a bigger boost through Akasha Mohammad’s unbeaten 17-ball 43 with four sixes and helped Titans post 189 for 5. Nasr Khan (2-45) and Mohammad Ali Mirza (2-33) bagged two wickets each.
Spartans got off to an excellent start with Mohammad Ali Mirza (32), who was declared the best batsman of the tournament for accumulating 119 runs from two matches, and Rudra Mahadev (34) putting on a 67 runs for the opening wicket.
It looked like a smooth sailing for the Spartans when Bandivdekar ran through the Spartans’ batting line-up to finish with 5 for 24. After the departure of the two openers, Siddanth Raina kept the scoreboard ticking with 24 from 43 balls. No. 8 batsman Aditya Gokale too tried to revive Spartans innings with an unbeaten 25 from 17 balls but could not steer his team to the target. Nilansh Keswani of Spartans won the Best Bowler award while Player of the Tournament went to Yuvraj Jaising of Gladiators.
