Kingswood School vs Venturers, Wednesday May 19th

Kingswood 124-7; Venturers about 100.

As is customary in this fixture, Kingswood batted first, to allow their late comers time to arrive. As is also customary, Kingswood included several batsmen who could hit the ball hard and long; in this fixture, the hard hitting came at the beginning and the end of the Kingswood innings. Our bowling was opened by Adam ,and Stuart, our 'real' cricketer. Adam started well, bowling an opener during a wicket maiden. After that, Adam took some punishment from their other opener, also their captain. Stuart, meanwhile, bowled four fast overs for 10 runs, most of which were scored via slashes to third man. He didn't take a wicket as he bowled a line just outside off stump and the batsman usually played and missed. Tom Rob, who replaced Stuart, bowled an accurate, full ball that jagged back a little, and immediately had the good opener bowled. Tom Rob contemned to bowl very well in a spell that yielded few runs and one more wicket, caught behind. Alex W, Nazar and Simon did little wrong in their spells, but had to bowl to a very good batsman who scored 40-odd in significantly fewer balls. We were saved from facing a higher total, by being able to bowl 8 dot-balls to a Chinese student without much experience of playing cricket. However, we were still left with a challenging total of around 125.

Chris M and Tom Ros started our reply steadily, before Tom Ros, feeling he needed to increase the tempo, chipped up a catch off their spinner. After that, we were always behind the run rate. Roger made an idiotic decision to run a quick single and was run out by miles. Alistair and Stuart were also run-out, but rather more unluckily, as in their cases there was a chance of a much needed run and they were out done by very good fielding. Indeed the Kingswood fielding was exceptional throughout, particularly that of the two or three Kingswood pupils who displayed somewhat more athleticism than were are used to seeing. Chris M stuck around for a while in a decent innings, and towards the end, Alex W hit some nicely timed boundaries, but the asking rate was too high by this time, and we were comfortably defeated.

After the game we were treated to a very fine supper of Stella Artois, pork pies, sausage rolls and scotch eggs. Shortly after this, I had to explain to my Doctor why my cholesterol levels appear to have taken a turn for the worse.

Fixtures & Results 2010