Kingswood vs Venturers, Wednesday May 18th

Kingswood 100-7, Venturers 101-1

We usually lose to Kingswood. They are the school staff side, which means that they have three or four distinctly good cricketers, find a couple more from among the schoolboys, and make up the numbers with more or less athletic non-cricketers. That's normally enough.

This time it appeared at first no different. The pavilion is a building site and a marquee had been set up nearby as a substitute, and it was not quite as windy as usual. Satheesh and Adam bowled fairly well but didn't cause the openers very much trouble: they moved along at five or six an over without taking undue risks. Our ground fielding held up rather better than it sometimes does, which was the first good sign. Only in Adam's last over did things start to run away.

Santosh stopped the rot with his flat leg-spin. His quicker ball is very devastating, although it does devastate wicket-keepers at least as much as batsmen. He bowled one opener straight away. The other, last year's 1st XI captain, was less happy with spin than he had been with quicker stuff, and hoicked hopelessly at Gregory. He survived because he hadn't dragged his foot, but when he got back to Santosh's end he charged him and was bowled. Gregory's daughter watched the proceedings with approval, as her teachers swatted weakly at her father's bowling and accumulated only seven runs, five of them by accident, and two got bowled. They were a little more successful at Santosh's end, because the ball went further, but not much. Santha bowled the last dangerous batsman with a late inswinger and Renju's pace was too much for the tail: he bowled two of them and the rest could do no more than keep him out. Four leg-byes in Santha's last over brought the score to exactly a hundred.

One of the schoolboys, in a Somerset youth sweater, bowled four accurate overs at the start of our innings. At the other end, Santosh swung wildly at the first three balls he received, sending the first into the air (it landed safely) and missing the next two. After that he settled down and tried to hit only the bad balls, of which there were enough to keep us going. Chris accumulated and various extras, as well as four overthrows when Santosh changed his mind about a single, helped us. Santosh might have been run out once or twice, and was dropped twice; but by the time the second catch went down he was in the forties and the match effectively over. We were deprived of a ten-wicket win when Santosh was bowled off his pads with five needed, but two no-balls in the next over ended the match before Ahad had a chance to do anything. Even he had more of a match than Arvind, who neither batted nor bowled and didn't seem to have much to field either. We do try to involve everybody but sometimes in 20 overs each way it just can't be done.

Fixtures & Results 2011