In what would have been our only afternoon clash of the season, we were to take on Sunrisers Hyderabad in an away game on 12^th April. We didn’t want the Sunday to go waste. We thought we could have a Sunrisers Hyderabad vs Rajasthan Royals game, a different kind of game. Twitter was chosen as the neutral venue for the Battleship clash between the two teams. The match got underway on schedule, at 4 PM.

Sea Report

Under cloudy skies, the two teams drew out their sails to take the ship into the ocean. The surface was quite damp with a tinge of blue-ish green to it. The seas were to get stormy with strikes of lightning and thunder predicted later in the evening.

Toss

The Sunrisers flipped the coin and we called it right. Rajasthan Royals elected to make the first move in this eagerly awaited Battleship match-up.

The 5 ships

Steve Smith
Sanju Samson
Ben Stokes
Jofra Archer
Riyan Parag

These 5 gems sailed deep into the sea to anchor and hide their ships out of SRH’s sight.

Let’s Play

Our first move couldn’t quite land on an SRH ship; felt more like the first-ball leave through to the keeper. However, SRH found the middle of the bat as they landed a hit on one of our corner cells.

We then got our first hit, when we got one of their corners. After a series of hits, both teams were down one ship. They destroyed Archer’s 3-cell ship, while we got hold of their star batsman, Kane Williamson and his 4-cell ship.

SRH sunk our second 3-cell ship with Ben Stokes on it in their next few moves. Soon enough, we got their 2-cell ship with their bowler, Bhuvneshwar Kumar on it. The 2-cell ships are more often than not, the most difficult to find on a Battleship board. Thankfully, we got it out of our way.

Evenly matched battle

Strategies were drawn left, right and centre on both ends. We brought the fans into this as well. A poll on Twitter was put out asking fans what our next move should be. Sadly, the winning option was a miss for us.

Our opponents got a bit ahead on the game as they started unravelling another one of our ships. We got a few explosions on one of their ships right after along column E. It soon became clear to us that their 5-cell ship was hidden in that very column.

It gets close

Very soon, both teams got a fair idea of where the 5-cell ships were hidden and made other moves to uncover the smaller ships. The game got quite intense and it was becoming clear that this could go down the wire. All of a sudden, SRH, who were looking for our smallest 2-cell ship, missed an attempt.