Kingswood Vs Venturers, Wednesday May 14th

Kingswood 178-7, Venturers 85-4

With some difficulty we got a team together, borrowing two players from Broughton Gifford, neither of whom played any part in the match at all. In fact none of us played much part. Chris H and Shubi bowled fairly well to an opening pair consisting of a very competent cricketer and a former student of Simon and Gregory’s, who is about as competent as you would expect such a person to be. That is, he is better at mathematics. He resisted for a while before Shubi bowled him, but by that time considerable damage was being done at the other end. As the ground is a big flat field next to another big flat field you wouldn’t expect the ball to be lost, but that would be to overlook the six foot wide bramble growing just the other side of the stone wall that separates the two. Into the middle of this plant the batsman unerringly hit Chris, who hadn’t really done anything to deserve it. At least that gave him time to assist his colleague, who was trying to keep the score using an iPad. This allows you to use a machine costing several hundred pounds to do, rather inefficiently, a job that can be done much better with a piece of paper and a pencil. If the sun was out, which it was, the scorer/umpire couldn’t see the screen, and every time something at all unusual happened there was a pause while he worked out how to enter it into the software. So of course we had run-outs at both ends, batsmen retiring, short runs, overthrows and just about everything else except for penalty runs and obscure ways of getting out.

The retirements came about because of Kingswood’s self-imposed retire-at-50 rule. Some years it is invoked heavily: some years we bowl them out for a hundred. The match is never close. This year the rule was invoked heavily and we lost heavily. After the first retirement they had a bit of a wobble. Each side had a proper sportsman on display. Chris’s badminton translates into some pleasantly wristy batting. Kngswood’s rugby player’s skills as a fly-half instead induced him to try a sharp single, and he was spectacularly run out by Manoj’s direct hit. Before that various attempts to hit across the line at Matt and Gregory had come to grief, but the opener had left the run-rate high. Kingswood had one proper cricketer left. He scooped his first ball in the general direction of Shubi, but got it over him; nearly ran himself out; and then quietly demolished us. Towards the end Nikhil took a low return catch that nobody but the batsman could really see had carried (he walked off), and a cameo from the German teacher ended when he hit the ball straight to Gregory and ran.

Even though another self-imposed Kingswood rule is that everybody who wants to gets to bowl two overs, we weren’t going to get the runs. Matt and Chris took some gentle batting practice until a chemist who bowls loopy leg-breaks came on. Matt raised his head and was bowled by a low full toss. Chris kept his head down but picked out the German teacher, who caught an awkward catch with an adroitness that seemed to surprise everybody, especially him. The rugby player revenged himself on Manoj by running him out in return, hitting the stumps with a two-handed diving pass to an imaginary but carefully positioned centre-half. Nikhil and Roger contributed scores that would have been useful if we hadn’t conceded so many. There were quite a lot of extras, which crashed the iPad a few times, and they had to bowl from one end only for a while as the setting sun made it impossible to see the screen or anything else from the other, but just before the sun set altogether we ran out of overs.