Cricket with the stars

Actorlectics and Boxy Boyz… no, they're not a new boy band, but a bunch of TV actors slugging it out on the cricket pitch for a good cause

Ashutosh Rana, Niharika Khan and Abhijeet Sawant

The flavour of the season is cricket and looks like television actors have taken it up with a vengeance. Actors Ayub Khan and Faisal Raza Khan with their cricket team, Actorletics, played a friendly Holi Cup match against Boxy Boyz yesterday.

The Boxy Boyz played more aggressively than the Actorletics and won the match with a score of 214. Actorletics lost by 17 runs. Ashutosh Rana made a grand entry on the pitch, post the first innings and so was not allowed to field, but was allowed to bat.

Jay Bhanushali got terribly upset after he got run out and made a quick exit. He even refused to stay back. Karan Wahi was seen applying sun-block and changing his cricket gear in front of the female crowd who were sitting quite close in order to cheer the players.

Team Actorletics includes Ayub Khan, Faisal Khan, Jay Bhanushali, Salil Acharya, Karan Wahi, Mohit Khan, Naveen Saini, Mohsin Akhtar, Muzammil Akhtar and Ashish Sharma.

Kabir Sadanand with team mates

Boxy Boyz on the other hand has players like Vikas Sethi, Abhijeet Sawant, Anand Suryavanshi, Anupam Bhattacharya, Kabir Sadanand, Manoj Bidvai, Krishna Sonie, Manoj Hinduja, Dilip Agarwal and Mickey Dudaney.

While this was the first match for the Actorletics, Boxy Boyz has played for several causes like the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and BETI.

The match began at 9.30 am and went on till 4 pm. There were cheerleaders galore including Ayub Khan's wife Niharika Khan, Shikha Verma and actors like Nupur Joshi and Supriya Shukla.

Says Faisal, "A lot of actors have played professional cricket at some level. Hence, we thought of coming together to form our own team."

Ayub says, "We thought it was be a great idea to combine sports with charity. Cricket is a national passion and we can raise money for charity via these matches whenever we manage to get time."