VENTURERS CRICKET CLUB: 2007 Match Reports

Venturers vs Canal Taverners, Thursday 7th June 2007
Author: Gregory Sankaran
Lost by 8 wickets. Venturers 122-6 Canal Taverners 123-2

It isn't quite clear what went wrong here, apart from their being better than us.
We made a reasonable score. Duncan's rather iffy 27, opening the innings, turned out to be the highest, but they dropped him twice so they weren't that much better than us, and most other people who batted contributed usefully. Duncan and Toby found the slow bowler who opened hard to get away and both had close LBW calls before Toby finally got totally in the way of an absolutely straight one. But runs came, if not freely, at least steadily at the other end. Ian G took a short while to find his feet and nearly got stumped when he lost them, but ended up with a brisk dozen. Duncan eventually holed out at mid-on, feeling that the scoring rate was too low and he had to take some risks, but Kevin was back to something like his best and Richard found plenty of singles. Then Kevin was run out, failing to start when Richard called him for a perfectly good second. Richard himself was bowled soon after and Gregory, idiosyncratically promoted, faced eight balls and missed six of them. The last of these was from Canal Taverners' St Lucian, who was celebrating the fact that his country now has a Test cricketer to go with its two Nobel Prize winners, and produced an unnecessarily good ball. He would have done better to bowl it to Fluffy (Ian B). He, and Matt, not only stopped the collapse but put together thirty-one runs from the last three overs, one of which had only five balls. They did this mainly by running like crazy: singles everywhere, three threes and, a final flourish, a five.

They soon had a lot more running to do as the ball followed them in the field. Kevin and Lee bowled quite well, but runs kept coming. The split fields we set were probably a mistake. Usually we do not expect our bowlers to keep it one side of the wicket, not that opposing batsmen will not swipe it over to the other side if they do. Split fields are therefore normal, because the direction that the ball will end up going in is largely random. Today, though, we bowled accurately and they played the ball with the slope into the large gaps. Gregory's lone over exemplified this: five balls pitched on the left-hander's off stump and were pushed down to Fluffy at long-off for, usually, two. But everybody else found the same thing. One lofted shot from one opener off Kevin picked out a fieldsman: unfortunately for him, it was Ian G. Duncan bowled three accurate overs and the left-hander, after reaching his fifty without indulging in extreme violence, top-edged Matt's first ball and was well caught by Richard, on the run.
A couple of other mishits fell in space, but we never managed to keep the runs down enough.

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