Venturers Vs Western Flyers, Tuesday April 29th

Western Flyers 120-7, Venturers 106-5

Last year we played this team twice and beat them comfortably both times, without convincing anybody that we were actually any better at cricket than they are. Then they were called “Stirling Dynamics” but were known to us as “Yameen’s lot”, and in many cases didn’t look like cricketers but were. Now they have had a makeover. They are called “Western Flyers”, but are known to us as “Yameen’s lot”, and have issued themselves with uniform shirts with their names on the back. As they go in for names like McCambridge and Wikramasinghe some slightly painful compromises in terms of typeface have had to be made, but they do all now look like cricketers at least in the way that Strephon in “Iolanthe” is a fairy, down to the waist.

As most of us neither look like nor are cricketers much below the hair, and as there were only seven of us in any case, we were in some trouble. Yameen, who is a cricketer all the way down to the ground, lent us himself and an equally competent colleague, out of the twelve he had brought, and we played nine against their ten, sixteen overs a side. The opener pulled Chris firmly for four a couple of times but on his third attempt, perhaps thrown off balance by his own name, he skied it. Harsh showed that we can also look like cricketers sometimes, catching it very efficiently. Chris aimed a splendid inswinger at the mortal toes of the other opener, and bowled him. Thereafter it got steadily worse, especially when Gregory bowled: we might just about have got away with it with eleven fielding, but not with nine. Eventually John had the number 3 stumped by Simon off a wide, but by that time we had already given away too many runs. They didn’t finish off very well, the other set batsman running himself out by the length of the pitch and Yameen contributing a couple of wickets, but it didn’t matter.

The other loaned player, Shehan, and John set off steadily, but the extra fieldsman made it much more difficult. We cannot complain that this was in any way unfair: it was entirely because we hadn’t brought enough players in the first place. They, and Chris after Shehan was out, profited from the unwinged feet of the fieldsmen to run some aggressive singles, but we needed boundaries and we didn’t get enough of them at any stage. We didn’t lose wickets until near the end. Then Chris and Nikhil holed out at midwicket and John holed out at mid-off. Harsh did better than at the weekend, getting in two wild swings instead of just one but still not connecting with any of them. By then, swinging wildly was the only possible approach and two or three connections might just have worked, but after it failed there was nothing for Yameen and Vikaash to do but play sensibly and await defeat.