Kilmington vs Venturers, Friday April 29th

Kilmington 214-4, Venturers 201

The British do it incomparably better than anybody else in the world. Not cricket, of course: public ceremony. We took advantage of the Bank Holiday associated with this particular public ceremony to play Kilmington. The usual date, the previous Sunday, was impossible as it was Easter Day: the weather then was glorious, whereas this Friday was mostly overcast and felt rather cold in the wind, but remained dry.

As usual at the first match of the season the captain knew only half the team, and he was relieved to be fielding rather than having to guess a sensible batting order straight away. For the first dozen or so overs we were visibly out of practice. Santha began it, putting down a simple return catch from his first ball, the seventh of the innings; and before long we had dropped both batsmen twice, given away a set of five wides and four overthrows, and committed several other misfields. To add to the incidents the junior opener had his bat break in half, right across the blade, driving at Santha. Most of Santha's and Paul's bowling was all right, and eventually Santha bowled the senior opener. Ranju, replacing Paul, was fast but inaccurate, but was not expensive in runs off the bat. Two lots of five no-balls, for high full tosses, might have been reason enough to bar him from bowling if the umpires had been so minded: perhaps they should have been really. Gregory was impressively, not to say surprisingly, accurate and conceded very little, but didn't much look as if he was going to get a wicket either, and it was Yamin, replacing Ranju, who finally broke through with a simple catch in the gully by Jack. Kilmington had plenty more batting, though, and accelerated smoothly towards the end. Another gully catch of Jack's was thought by the umpires to have bounced first and a very noticeable noise was apparently not an edge to the keeper, but next over the batsman made a preposterous attempt to charge Simon, so it didn't make much difference. A left-hander with spray-on pads hit a large six and then got bowled by Ilyas, but the scoring rate got rather too high at the end and they ended up with what looked like far too many runs.

This impression was sharply reinforced when Chris was bowled and Yamin rather well caught at slip before the end of the third over. Jack and Ranju continued quietly for a while. Then Ranju remembered what he had seen on his box set of IPL videos: he took three steps down the wicket and one towards square leg, and carved a middle-stump ball of good length uppishly past mid-off. The next two balls went for rather more conventional fours and although he couldn't keep that up, he continued to hit fours regularly. Jack played inside a straight one, but that only brought in Tony, who despite his injured leg also batted very aggressively. The hundred came up in the fourteenth over and we were running away with it.

What we knew and Kilmington didn't, although as they've played us before they must have guessed, was that we were two wickets from disaster. Tony misjudged the length and was rather simply bowled, dropping his bat in disappointment. At first that seemed like disaster already, because Ilyas looked unconvincing at the start of his innings; and no sooner had he started to settle than Ranju, with a hundred within reach, ran for a misfield. Ilyas sent him back, immediately and firmly; but Ranju slipped as he turned, and the fieldsman recovered so well that he hit the stumps direct from twenty yards. Even without either of these things Ranju might have been out; one would have been sufficient, and both together ran him out by a ridiculous distance.

We still had a chance. We had, at least, enough overs: if we could stay there we should very likely win. Ilyas was nowhere near as aggressive as Tony, let alone Ranju, but he hit well when he got the chance. Alex held an end up for a while and made a few. Santha tried to get all the runs with a few slogs, which worked rather well on a couple of occasions last year but failed this time. Simon hit two good shots and then missed; and Ilyas missed also. Paul and Gregory had twenty to get and five and a bit overs to get them in: unlikely, but not completely impossible. Gregory swung reasonably effectively a couple of times at the quicker bowler but before they got really close, Paul ran himself out.

Fixtures & Results 2011