Kingswood Vs Venturers, Wednesday May 15th

Kingswood 110, Venturers 111-0

Certain things are fixed at Kingswood. It is cold; there is a generous tea afterwards (at about 8:30 p.m.) and the match is one-sided. Not always the same side. This year it was our turn. Kingswood staff are often reinforced by a schoolboy or two, but not this year. We played with a pink ball, which few of us were used to. It felt hard, but that may have been the effect of the cold, and it was so easily visible that it sometimes, until you got used to it, seemed closer to you than it was. This could explain, were not simple incompetence an altogether more compelling reason, why Murali attempted to reach a catch that was nowhere near him, and Gregory, who could have caught it if he had run towards it, stayed where he was.

The bowler was John, who does not bowl much but was able to exploit the high bounce of the artificial pitch we were playing on. Kevin, trying to bowl in ordinary shoes because spikes were forbidden, had by then given up, and Gregory had run out of overs after removing his daughter’s maths teacher, who to general approval hit the ball straight into Kevin’s hands. Sanket cleverly bowled the other opener, who had been quite effective; John got two wickets anyway, and demonstrated how catching in the deep ought to be done; another maths teacher, and Bath graduate, was stumped by Alex off Simon, who both used to teach him; and there was an absurd run-out at the end.

We needed to make about 110, as always this season. It is usually a struggle, but not this time. Matt seemed more confident than John to begin with, but once the opening bowlers were off (and Kingswood only gave them two overs each) John took over, keeping the strike, making the most of the short boundaries and driving one ball straight under the bench his parents were sitting on. They didn’t move, but his mother raised one foot to let the ball go. Matt did finally get to face at the beginning of an over, but it was the thirteenth and we only needed one to win: he got it, via a dropped half-chance, off the sixth ball; but John had outscored him nearly five to one.

Scorecard