So this is what it feels like to be from Bangladesh. The match against The Star started promptly ten minutes before the advertised time and three minutes before Gregory arrived. Perhaps this had something to do with some other sporting event, Austria versus Paraguay at beach volleyball or Canadian pro-celebrity sudoku, which at one stage had been rumoured to endanger the whole match. All our bowlers were ludicrously expensive, and our tally of dropped catches, missed stumpings and fluffed run-outs probably ran to about a dozen. To be fair to the fielders, none of the missed chances was really easy: to be fair to the bowlers, the boundary on one side was very short indeed. A push off Duncan ran between Adam and Jiten and went for four before either of them even realised it; a miscue off Gregory, hit with no remarkable power, would have landed in Duncan's hands had he been allowed to stand a couple of yards further back. Neither of these bowlers realised how short the boundary was until they later went to field there: had they known, they might have tried to bowl differently, although they might not have succeeded. Luke kept tidily on the whole, and even achieved a stumping, though it was a long-range one; and Paul Wilson picked up some wickets at the end by hitting the stumps, though he was no more economical than anybody else.

Of course when we batted the very short boundary was still there, and apart from the few who had batted the opposition didn't know about it either. That was proved when their captain tried to move mid-on back to the fence and was told "this is the fence". But we were short of the necessary big hitters. Owain, profiting from a dropped catch much easier than anything we put down, did his best, but Adam got stuck. The Star tried a lot of bowlers, all of whom seemed to be known by code letters such as J and H. Unfortunately J, or perhaps Q or T or F or something, bowled alarmingly well, removing Owain and then Luke, our only real big hitter, first ball. Luke might well feel aggrieved as this was the only time that anybody caught anything in the whole match, and it was exactly the same catch as the one Owain had been dropped off earlier. Later on Adam ran himself out, with some assistance from the alarming bowler; puzzlingly Paul, the innocent partner, kept apologising afterwards, apparently under the impression that he had something to do with it. Even that did not raise the scoring rate much, and the match fizzled out as The Star worked through the alphabet.