Noida dads have a ball with kids on Father’s Day

It’s not every day that you witness a cricket match where all the players are stress-free and are seen cheering their opponents, instead of strategizing. Kids and their dads celebrated Father’s Day playing a T-20 cricket game organized by NoidaMoms at a Sector 15A park on Sunday morning. After winning the toss, Team A decided to bat first. But their decision proved wrong as their wickets fell like ninepins.However, an equally poor performance by Team B made the match interesting. Ultimately, the game proved to be less about haar-jeet, and more about having masti.
Who cares about the rules? We are a family!
The match saw both boys and girls team up with their fathers. The parents showed no loyalty to their respective teams and instead cheered all the kids, encouraging them to step out and send the ball out of the park. Suggestions like ‘Beta maine jaise sikhaya tha waise mujhe out karna’, and ‘Bas bhaago aur run banao’ poured in from all directions during the match.
Vishal, a father who was seen cheering his son, said, “We fathers are like ‘chalo koi nahin, let’s play’, but our kids are taking the match too seriously.”
Vishal added, “Some of the best moments of today’s match were when the kids bowled their fathers out and the fathers gave them a pat on their backs for playing well! We even had a rule to make the match competitive – no father could be in the same team as his son or daughter.” The mothers were seen cheering the kids and kept on shouting stuff like ‘Beta papa ko out karo’, ‘He is not your uncle, he is your rival, bowl fast.’ Shavi Gupta, a member of NoidaMoms, said, “We had our doubts that the kids won’t be able to wake up so early. But they were so excited that they woke up even before us. We started the match at 6.30am.” The players didn’t seem to care about the rules much, and even the batsmen were rotated so that everybody got a chance to bat.
Didn’t score? Make changes on the scoreboard: Didn’t get enough runs on the board? No worries, just erase the score written on the board and write whatever you feel like. Well, that was the scenario of scorekeeping. Anju Dhingra, a member of NoidaMoms, was responsible for maintaining the scoreboard, and she was meticulously keeping track of every run scored and every fallen wicket. When someone called her and she asked a kid to keep an eye on the scoreboard.
That’s when two kids of team B, who weren’t impressed by the way their team was scoring, took over and changed the score from 17 to 32, giving their team the much needed help, though a little unfairly. Team A had set the target of 44 runs. When Anju came back, she chased the kids away and changed the score back to 17. But the senior members of Team B starting accusing her of cheating. She laughed and said, “You are putting pressure on me. This is pure match-fixing and I can’t allow it.”
Parents were more excited than kids: More than the kids, it were their parents who were seen shouting and jumping as they relived their childhood days. The kids were prepared and wanted to play a fair game, but their parents wanted all the players to get the chance to bat and bowl, irrespective of who wins. Yash, a player of team A complained, “Mujhe toh kisi ne batting karne nahin di. Sirf do ball kheli maine,” as his mother explained, ‘Beta aur log bhi hain na.” The children were called one after the other to try their luck with batting. Some kids got impatient and started asking, “Mera number kab aayega?” Manya, a cricket enthusiast, was surprised to see her mom in the overzealous avatar. “I kept asking her to calm down. She was constantly giving instructions like a football coach. Meri mummy toh bachchi ban gayi hai aaj.”
And the rain won the game: No cricket fan loves the rain, but the morning downpour was welcomed by the players of both the teams, more so because they it saved them from having a winner in a match where the rules didn’t matter much! When it started drizzling, the result could have swung both ways and all the players left the field knowing that. Interestingly, the captains of both the teams were the first to run away from the field. When everyone was looking for them to take a call on the match, somebody said, “The match is a tie. The captains have gone to attend a yoga session.”