Western Flyers Vs Venturers, Sunday June 1st

Western Flyers 115; Venturers 119-7

This was closer than it looks: there were only ten of us, so at the moment of victory, and for some time before, we had only two wickets left, one of them Gregory’s. It didn’t seem likely to be close at all, though, early on when Siddanth and Chris were bowling. Siddanth had trouble even controlling the swing early on, but once he got the line right he was very awkward, and Chris, again, beat the bat repeatedly for little reward. The first wicket came from a leading edge off Siddant that looped up on the offside. Matt H, keeping, called for it and was ignored, and flattened, by Murali, who did at least hold on.. The second was another miscue, but straight back to the bowler. At the other end, Saad, who used to play for us, lost patience and missed, pulling incautiously at Chris. Three pinpoint inswinging yorkers from Siddanth followed in the next three overs. The last of them started two feet outside off stump and came in very late to the bottom of off stump. If you know one of those is coming you can get outside the line, but second ball it was too much for the very good Western Flyers batsman, who simply turned to the wicket-keeper and slip and nodded, acknowledging a ball too good for him.

That was 20-6: it had been 9-5 but Shehan had taken a brief liking to Chris’s bowling in the previous over and hit him for a six, trebling the runs off the bat, and a four. He and the left-handed Jude (even if we didn’t know who they are, we could tell because they have their names on their shirts, not always spelt correctly) improved matters slightly, but Jude likes the ball coming on to him and edged to the wicket-keeper when Gregory came on. At the other end, Mridul also had trouble controlling the ball, though he didn’t go for much off the bat. His problems with line and Gregory’s with length (slightly too many short ones) let Western Flyers escape a little. Eventually Mridul induced Shehan to play across a straight one, but Western Flyers can all bat. In the end the pressure of overs told, Gregory inducing a catch to mid-on and Harsh collecting a return catch at the second attempt to end the innings.

We were confident of getting the 116 we needed, but Chris M played all round a straight ball in the first over and we didn’t have all that much batting to come. We needed a contribution from at least one of Chris H and Matt H. Both of them, but especially Chris, found it hard to get the ball away on the slow pitch: Matt was more positive, but was dropped three times. Before very long his luck ran out. With the solid but rather strokeless Manoj for a partner, Chris tried to raise the tempo himself and got stumped. Mridul played one attractive shot and them missed a ball slanted across him from the quickish left-armer who had come on. The next ball came back into Murali and bowled him, too.

So in came Harsh. His hero is, not unreasonably, Virender Sehwag, whose mantra is “See ball; hit ball”. Harsh has had some difficulties with the second clause, perhaps because of insufficient attention to the first. His approach to the hat-trick ball was never going to be to block it. It was straight and full, and the wild heave Harsh played missed by a considerable distance.

Now we were glad of the solidity of Manoj, whose hero, more reasonably still, is Rahul Dravid. For the rest of the innings he stood immovable at one end, complaining of not timing the ball and not making any runs, but delighting the rest of us by not getting out. His partner initially was Siddanth, who was determined not to let his earlier work with the ball go to waste, and clouted cheerful at anything that wasn’t straight. This was quite effective. He gave a difficult chance to deep square leg, and the dropping of it inspired a fielding change. The wicket-keepin duties were taken over by Tim (who has done it for us) and the regular wicket-keeper dispatched to the leg-side boundary; and there he caught the second, also difficult, chance offered by Siddanth.

We still needed 38 when Simon joined Manoj. It was a little while before it became clear that Western Flyers had a problem. Manoj wasn’t going to get out. He wasn’t going to get many runs either, but the required rate wasn’t high: they needed another wicket. And, at the other end, Simon was soon not just solid but timing the ball well, the only batsman on either side at any point to do so. The most difficult bowlers on this surface were running out of overs. The trick was to get Manoj to take the quicker bowlers and leave Simon to deal with spin. Whenever the spinners gave him any room, Simon found the gaps and he used the sweep judiciously. Under pressure, the hitherto good ground fielding collapsed, and finally Simon ended the match with three consecutive boundaries, making him the highest scorer of the game with 35 not out. At the other end, Manoj had batted twenty-six overs for 12 runs. If he hadn’t, we should certainly have lost.