Venturers vs Pedigree, Sunday August 15th

Pedigree 116 Venturers 39 or 41

This time we had two eight-year-old fielding for us: Gregory's son Alban, who had done it against Bill Owen, and Paul's son Xander, who was talked into it by Alban. They did rather well. The rest of us didn't; not with the bat, anyway. We had agreed that forty overs each would be too many, and settled on thirty, but only forty-two were needed for the entire match. With Simon keeping wicket we were potentially short of bowlers, but Paul made early inroads, Gregory had one of his more effective days and Iain, only an occasional bowler, filled in well. We got several wickets with the rather few bad balls we did bowl, the highlight being a ridiculous half- or rather quarter-tracker from Iain, which led to a lobbed return catch. When Gregory did induce a simple catch to mid-off with a good ball, Will dropped it; so Gregory tried again, bowled a ghastly full toss, with exactly the same result except that Will caught it this time. Later he caught a better catch, Ian G also caught a good one, and generally we fielded quite well.

Iain and Tom started cautiously, but there was no hurry. Iain was the more fluent of the two and was in no real trouble until he gave a high but simple catch to the faster of the two opening bowlers, who dropped it. Next ball, at the other end now, he lost his leg stump; and the fast bowler, now cross, demolished three of us, ending in the following over with Tom with successive balls. As the eight-year-olds weren't going to bat we were effectively 25 for 6 and it didn't get any better. Iain's 11 was the top score. The only thing was that thirty overs a side meant six per bowler, so the openers couldn't finish us off. We survived against the change bowlers long enough for Rich, who wasn't really playing, to arrive; so when Simon clipped the second ball of the sixteenth over to mid-on, Rich was allowed to bat. Once again Gregory, the non-striker, found himself at the crease wondering whether his innings had ended or not; but all that happened was that Rich made two runs, which may or may not have counted, off the fourth ball and was totally LBW to the fifth.

Fixtures & Results 2010