Venturers vs Priston, Sunday May 3rd

Venturers 142 all out – Priston 144-7

Priston have a proper village cricket pitch. You go behind the pub, up past the church and it is the field with no other sounds other than the sheep bleating at inappropriate times in the next field. Lovely.

They play timed cricket rather than overs based, so when we batted first we had from 2:30 until tea to make our runs. Matt and Roger opened and ran well between the wickets, but struggled to find the boundaries, which square of the wicket were quite long. Roger made 22 before being stumped. Matt, who top-scored with 32, and Fluffy, who came in at three, both fell to appalling attempted hoiks over long on having gotten started, trying to push the run rate too soon. Simon T and Alex both played some decent shots, but got out too soon and Adam, Chris M, Charlie and Tom M all struggled to find runs. Simon S and Paul S came in at the end and put on an extra 20 to get us to 142, but we had only used 35 overs. A bad idea in limited overs cricket: a very bad idea in timed cricket. With the tea having not yet arrived we went out to bowl four overs and hopefully get a breakthrough.

With the exception of a bit more pace from the third change bowler, Priston had used entirely spin or slow bowlers, making use of good line and length and a sideways sloping wicket to reduce our run scoring. The question was whether the greater zip of Paul S and Simon T (and Matt as first change) would find anything in the pitch. Unfortunately the answer was not much. Paul S was accurate and miserly, but unsuccessful. Simon T took an over to get going, but then clean bowled the larger opener to get the breakthrough. A later, powerfully hit, straight drive was as likely to break his arm as be caught and in the end saving the four was as much as coud be hoped for. The other opener was about 13 and looked very good. He gave two hard chances off Paul S, but neither stuck. Simon S and Matt were the first change and kept up the tight bowling, but we only got one wicket (stumped by Roger off Simon) before they ran out of overs. Adam and Fluffy replaced them and had a bit more joy. Roger got even more revenge by taking three more stumpings of his own from Fluffy's leg spin, helping him get 4-35, and Adam also bowled very well for little reward. Unfortunately they had too many overs to get the runs, the rules being '20 after 6:30'. We had already bowled 27 by the time this came round. It took them 42 overs to knock the runs off, for 7 wickets. If we had batted to tea we would have had maybe 10 or 20 more runs and given Priston 4 fewer overs to get our higher total. It was also a pity that Gregory wasn't playing - he loves bowling uphill at left-handers, and given the sloping pitch and the proliferation of lefties in the Priston lineup, he would have been in heaven!

The tea was extremely nice. The lady who produced the feast was apparently also celebrating her wedding anniversary - we're not sure how her husband persuaded her to make food for us on their special day, but we wish them many happy returns!

Fixtures & Results 2009