Venturers vs Bath Knights, Wednesday July 30th

Bath Knights 148-6 Venturers 107-6

The Bath Knights are a decent team, and some of their players are quite a lot more capable than we would like. One of these in particular did the damage and his destructive innings won the match in the first innings. They batted first due to being short of players, (typical in their matches, as with Kingswood ), and their opener could hit the short ball. He pulled the ball from outside off stump through midwicket off Ian G several times and moved rapidly to 20. After a couple of overs of damage he mistimed one of these and Ahmad took a tidy catch running around mid-off. At the other end Matt finished his first spell and was replaced by Adam Paz who bowled a great spell that went unrewarded. Ian G removed the number 3 cheaply in his final over via a catch by Adam, and that brought in their main batsman.

Hugo – Alistair's neighbour – struggled with his length for his first 2 overs and was very expensive bowling to the good bat, but bowled with good pace and removed the other opener in his second over. His third over was really good and cost only a wide, denying him a well-deserved maiden. Emmad was unlucky that he had to bowl to the number 4 in full swing and the batsmen took the odd risk to hit several boundaries. Fluffy then caused a couple of problems and was very unlucky to be denied yet another brace of really good LBW shouts. His frustration was obvious – one of these was a full toss on middle stump that hit the batsman just above bail height. Matt bowled his second spell and removed the number 6 before he could score, while Fluffy ran out the number 5 with another fantastic throw from the deep - Alex removing the bails. Alex also narrowly missed out on a self-made wicket, quickly flicking the ball onto the stumps with the batsman missing and only just getting back into his crease.

Their best bat scored 72 and they had accumulated 147, which was way too many for us. We needed a fantastic start to get anywhere against such a big total and Alistair and Paul Adams took strike. Alistair went early when the opener, after a couple of half-track wides, bowled a beauty that came back in sharply to clip the off-stump. Paul played well against good bowling and got a couple of boundaries before being bowled by the same bowler. Ahmad and Roger were together for a couple of overs and put on a very rapid 20. There would have been more but Roger was removed by a phenomenal catch down the leg side by their keeper. It really was an incredibly good catch and Roger was understandably surprised to see the ball in the gloves rather than crossing the rope as it normally would have.

Emmad hit a rapid-fire 7, including a 4 off his first ball, before being bowled and then Ahmad was out next over in the same way trying to raise the run rate. With 5 wickets gone and half the match remaining the score was 53 and 10-an-over for the remaining overs was well out of reach. Ian G and Alex batted to get us to a respectable 3 figure score and put on 40 for the next wicket. This came during the penultimate over when Ian was bowled for 22. Matt had a hit in the last over and put on 12 in just 5 balls, including consecutive boundaries, to finish the match with Alex who batted really well and was also not out on 16.

Fixtures & Results 2008