Canal Taveners vs Venturers, Wednesday 11th July

Venturers 69, Canal Taverners 59

For the second time in successive matches we lost an opener first ball: Roger this time, caught at mid-on off the second ball of the innings, which popped, after the first had shot and gone for one bye. Batting was difficult and the runs came slowly, even with Alistair’s approach to singles. There should have been a couple of run-outs, at least. He and David put together what turned out to be a useful stand at about two runs an over, ending when David missed. Chris hit the first four of the innings to open his score, in the seventh over, and shortly after that Alistair was out to a good catch. After that only Mark, who hit the other four, offered Chris any support: Alex, Tom, Jey, Harsh (who didn’t face a ball), Simon and Gregory contributed three between them. Chris got out himself part-way through the collapse, and we were bowled out for 69 with five balls unused.

Canal Taverners made a steady start, hitting more boundaries in their opening partnership than we had throughout, but did’t run away and Harsh suddenly pinned them back by removing both openers and the number 4 with straight balls that kept a bit low. As this had happened fairly consistently the batsmen had little cause for complaint. Roger, out to one that didn’t, had had more. So did Gregory, who had one ball of full length bounce over middle stump. The main danger was an agressive left-hander who had done serious damage to us in the earlier fixture and now hit a six off Tom: we didn’t have enough runs to be able to afford that. In his earlier innings he had largely obliterated Gregory, but this time he was unable to make any progress, lost patience, swung and was bowled. Gregory and David each conceded only nine runs from their four overs: David would have done better if Gregory hadn’t somehow forgotten he was supposed to field the ball and allowed a gentle push to trundle straight past him, making no visible attempt to stop it. David also collected a couple of wickets and by the time Simon and Jay took over the run rate was becoming a problem for the Taverners. It wasn’t the final problem, though: the problem was that, after one batsman perished in a failed attempt to charge Simon, Jey simply removed the rest and they were bowled out with seven balls to spare, ten runs short.