Venturers Vs Lichfield Nomads, Saturday July 12th

Lichfield Nomads 67, Venturers 68-1

The difficulty with playing touring sides, for both parties, is gauging strength. We tend to find the tourists too strong for us, and when we discovered that Lichfield’s other opponents were to be Hinton Charterhouse we thought it might be going to happen again. There were only ten of them present, though, so we agreed to lend them a fieldsman.

Siddanth, in his last game for us before taking up a new job in London, and Chris, found the conditions rather to their liking despite the hot weather, and bowled accurately and well. The odd ball bounced a bit more, too, and this accounted for one opener, who tried to cut and presented Manoj with a catch. Scoring runs seemed very difficult, and Chris induced an edge to Simon, at a wide slip. Harsh put down a slightly awkward chance at square leg, but Siddanth and Chris simply persisted with their lines and gradually the Lichfield batsmen one by one lost patience and put the ball in the air. Where they were unlucky was that every time they did so it went to a fieldsman, who caught it. Neither of these things is normal. Only one of the catches was especially good, a very low chance taken by Roger, who just got a glove under it. The others were routine catches such as we should not drop, but frequently do. Harsh’s drop was an aberration, as he proved: he took two of the catches, very competently, and when Lichfield attempted a leg-bye to get a tailender off strike he hit the stumps at the bowler’s end from square leg. Eventually Siddanth and Chris were taken off (this was a time game, with no restriction on bowlers) and replaced with Shrey, who bowled seven overs for three runs, and Gregory, who trapped the last remaining player with any shots leg before. It wasn’t quite the end of the story: inspired by Shami and by Anderson, the last pair resisted, pretty much strokelessly, for a long time, and it needed a fast straight ball from Parth to end the innings.

We thought that we would lose a few wickets along the way, and indeed both Siddanth and Nikhil miscued early on. In both cases the ball fell far from the fieldsmen, the sort of luck that Lichfield hadn’t had. After five overs Siddanth found his range and hit a six, but went quiet again after that for a little longer: Nikhil overtook him briefly. Then he attacked one of the opening bowlers to the point where he was removed from the attack in favour of an off-spinner, whose first three balls, only one of them really bad, cost sixteen. By the end of the following over, the tenth, we needed only three runs. The Lichfield captain brought himself on to bowl loopy legbreaks. Siddanth scored a two, taking his score to 48; missed one swipe; found a close fieldsman with another and then connected. The ball soared towards the mid-wicket boundary. A Lichfield fieldsman stuck one hand up. The ball hit it and knocked him off his feet, but he held on and rolled away from the boundary. So Shrey came out to finish it off, but got two wides that we decided we couldn’t really call, so a nudge by Nikhil at the start of the next over did the job instead. There would have been time for a beer match, but Lichfield opted for just beer.