In beautiful weather, the first match of the season started promptly: so promptly, in fact, that Gregory arrived ten minutes before the scheduled start and saw the first ball bowled as he drove in. The bowler was Duncan, and in April one might have expected his style to be fairly effective and the four slow bowlers we had brought to be too many. But in fact the opening bowlers made little impression, though they also gave little away, and it was Gregory who got the first wicket: a careless swipe ending in the hands of Luke, who had been moved to deep square leg the previous ball. And it was another slow bowler who got the next two wickets; but that was quite a lot later. We were a bit unlucky. Several mishits went not quite to hand; there was a near run-out, and once the batsman came much closer to hitting his stumps than hitting the ball. But we did also drop a couple of not terribly hard catches, as well as a couple of harder ones. The culprits were not the usual suspects either, but people with normally safe pairs of hands.

It was Paul, who still seems to be known as Betty, who changed things, bowling both batsmen with consecutive balls (in different overs, naturally). He rather spoilt the effect by producing a wide next ball, but could and should have had more wickets. But we still couldn't catch, and Luke damaged a finger trying. Still, we had got rid of their most dangerous bats, apart from one whose build and headgear gave him the appearance of Oliver Hardy in Sons of the Desert; and James eventually accounted for him. Andy and Steve kept things reasonably tight at the end, Betty caught a catch more droppable than many that had been dropped, and on the whole we were only slightly disappointed to be chasing 190. We had given away more than 30 extras, though.

The difficulty soon became apparent. If you were content to stay there, and a reasonably competent batsman, you could; but against accurate bowling, which they had, it was hard to score runs at any brisk rate. Andy made 42, but it took him a long time; Richard made rather fewer, and it took almost as long. This was better than losing wickets would have been; but it meant that we had to hope that sooner or later Andy would cut loose, or that Luke would have one of his days. But Andy eventually got out; and Luke, perhaps hampered by his injury, got a full ball on leg stump early on. After that it was downhill, though Chintan did enough to ensure respectability as well as running out James. They didn't even quite bowl us out, because Oliver Hardy dropped a simple return catch off the last ball of the match. Long before then, though, the actual outcome was settled.