Evolution of cricket in P&G

For those who came in late - I am part of the P&G cricket team - which true to P&G culture was the best at work life balance but thats pretty much where it all ended.. nets was an unheard of concept and playing a match with 11 was as real as getting incremental money at the end of the fiscal.. notables on this team included Sriram 'blast from the past' , manish 'got married and disappeared' Chaudhury and Nitin 'runs as fast as he walks' Gajria and me ..

Every match was a combination of a) a flawless execution of a middle order collapse b) a bowling line-up that was determined to help the opposing batsmen get a few runs (some1 needs to do that right!) and c) incessant intellectualisation on what worked and what not after that match - all fairly unactionable stuff..

In between, we went a step better - we joined Kaybee - a team that was as splintered as ours, Ganji loved the guys who played there - with a seasons cumulative score of less than the number of Km from Newton to Novena - id think he had good enough reason to be pissed off when he wass dropped from the team ;) - but the external perspective while playing for these guys was helpful.. we realised others sucked just as bad - and Sriram took the leap of faith saying 'P&G will field its own team this year'..

And when u could just hear the laughter dying out (as a reaction to Srirams statement) - we saw the advent of a new generation of cricketers in P&G - Bakir 'demolition man' Shaikh, Paddu 'Nazi captain', Tapish - the ice cool killer, Raffy - the diversity quota (hehe - actually the Gilchrist) and Bharat 'currently limping ' V. ..

More about what happened to this team - in my next post..