Venturers Vs Bill Owen, Sunday June 8th

Bill Owen 149-2, Venturers 151-2

This was a weirdly featureless match, like the Mojave Desert. Both sides had ten players: Bill Owen had never had any more, but we had expected eleven and were reduced to ten in the morning by illness. Ordinarily, under these circumstances, we would lend each other a fieldsman to save to much ball-chasing, but Bill Owen declined to cooperate on the grounds that they had only a few players young enough to field willingly, and one of them would often be scoring or umpiring. This was reasonable enough, but it partly explains the scores. In Simon’s absence, Chris H was captain, but he lost the toss too.

They made a slow start and it got slower when their regular wicketkeeper, opening the batting as he sometimes does, chopped a ball from Siddanth onto his stumps. It was a while before the number 3 got going. The other opener never did; but he never got out either and ended the innings on 35 not out at the end of the 31st over. Long before that, though, runs had started coming at the other end. It began with a straight six off Chris, which went quite a long way, and continued with several sixes off Gregory, which were accurately placed between the fieldsmen and about a yard beyond the boundary. In fact the opening attack on Chris was the only extravagance. He just waited for the bad ball and then hit it for the maximum number of runs in the minimal way. We didn’t even bowl very many bad balls. Shubi escaped altogether and everybody ended up with respectable figures consisting mainly of dot balls and boundaries. After Gregory gave away slightly too many boundaries for Chris’s liking he tried Vikas, with much the same results, and things were almost completely out of hand by the time Doug finally got the wicket we wanted.

As it turned out, it didn’t make all that much difference. Soon afterwards there was a sharp shower and we agreed to reduce the overs to 35 a side so as not to be left with an incomplete match if there was another one. In the middle of the 31st over there was another one. We completed the over, hurriedly, and ran for cover and tea, reducing the overs to the 31 that had been bowled. Bill Owen declined the Duckworth-Lewis correction, which would have given them an extra 24 runs, in favour of being allowed no limit on bowlers. That turned out not to make much difference either.

What did make a difference was Siddanth. Not immediately: Matt and Chris H opened the batting and made steady but unspectacular progress for ten overs. At this point Matt benefitted from a duff decision: he swatted a high full toss, which was called as a no-ball by Chris M acting on Gregory’s wrong advice, to square leg. It wasn’t high enough to be a no-ball, though, off the slow bowler who bowled it: the Laws have this distinction still, although the playing conditions of many competitions disallow any full toss above waist high at any pace. At this point we were playing a 20-over match and needing 113. Matt gave another catch very soon after, which was dropped, and a third almost immediately, which was taken.

Siddanth and Chris worked the ball around for a while, taking few risks but provoking occasional outbursts from Bill Owen’s excitable (but only when he bowls) tax advisor. Then Siddanth suddenly accelerated, hitting two sixes off the tax advisor and a small rattle of fours at the other end. Chris, who had dominated the scoring up to that point, was left behind and soon got out, but it was clear by then that Bill Owen did not have the bowling resources to stop Siddanth. All we needed was for him not to get himself out, which he didn’t look like doing, and for someone to stay with him, which would ordinarily be more of a problem.

Fortunately, going in at the fall of the second wicket was Manoj, owner of by far the soundest defensive technique in the club. He didn’t even have to turn it on to its full 15-runs-per-100-balls extent, but played several well-judged attacking shots of his own. Siddanth did the opposite, attacking whenever possible but defending with a straight bat when not, and between them they cantered home with no hurry and three overs to spare. Duckworth and Lewis would, if the earlier calculation had been done and the match had been abandoned at this point, have awarded it to them by four runs, but that takes no account of our having had a limit on bowlers, so the result was probably fair enough in the end. Exactly three hundred runs were scored overall, in fifty-nine overs, for the loss of only four wickets.