Kilmington vs Venturers, Sunday April 25th

Kilmington ? for 3; game abandoned due to rain

Tradition dictates, as Kevin pointed out, that the first match of the season should be played in the Gulf with pink balls. The Ashes - the Icelandic kind, not the Australian kind - would have prevented us doing that even if we had tried, but Gregory claims that in April last year he got stuck at Dubai airport anyway and it rained there too.

On the way to Kilmington all seemed well. The blue skies of the previous two weeks had given way to grey, but there was still plenty of blue in the form of signs urging the peacefully grazing sheep to vote for people called Rees-Mogg. We lost the toss and fielded. Paul and Rashid obtained considerable movement, Paul off the pitch and Rashid through the air, and beat the bat several times, but although we fielded well they had no luck. Rashid might have been given an LBW but it was a close call.

Soon afterwards it suddenly started to rain hard. We went indoors and stared at the fittings of the pavilion. These include a photograph of Clive Lloyd, puzzlingly captioned "Derek Randall". Before we worked out why, the rain stopped, and Rashid's second ball after the break was edged to second slip, but there wasn't one. Stuart, replacing Paul, was more direct. His first ball for the Venturers cut in from outside off and knocked the leg stump back. But the wet ball was harder to grip: both bowlers produced one wildly inaccurate ball and both struck the unfortunate wicketkeeper (Alex) on the head. He was unharmed, but kept in a helmet thereafter. Gregory replaced Rashid and was not quite as prompt as Stuart: it took him three balls to remove his first left-hander of the season, leg before. The next left-hander has been a victim of Gregory's every year for some time now, but today he tried to give himself room to hit Stuart through the off side and had his off stump flattened. The right-handed opener, beginning to play well, had deposited Gregory for a couple of fours and the new batsman had just demonstrated with a neat square cut that she could see Stuart's bowling against the darkening sky even if we couldn't, when it started to rain again.

This time it did not stop.

Fixtures & Results 2010