Venturers Vs Bill Owen, Wednesday July 30th

Venturers 290-2, Bill Owen 225-5

We had eight. Bill Owen, who had eleven, lent us one they had picked up on the way somewhere, name of Dominic and quite a good cricketer. Simon wasn’t playing, so we won the toss and batted. Nikhil hit four fours in the first over, three of them deliberate, charging at everything, and was expectedly stumped soon after. Matthew was calmer and Chris, who came next, calmer still, and they settled and then started attacking some wayward bowling. Bill had been accidentally generous by asking for the usual eight overs per bowler limit: if he has few bowlers he normally asks for ten, so as not to force non-bowlers to bowl, which we wouldn’t have minded, but he had lent us one of his bowlers. We intervened and offered a ten over limit instead, and the part-timers were taken off.

This slowed the scoring a bit but made little other difference. Perhaps it shortened the match a bit because slightly less time was spent trampling the corn to recover the ball after boundaries. Chris chipped a ball back to the bowler: neither he nor the bowler knew whether it was a clean catch, and Matthew and the wicketkeeper both thought it was, but to everybody else the bump ball was obvious. That was the nearest we came to losing a wicket until Chris, in the eighties by then, was dropped from a difficult chance by Bill himself. By then Matthew was in three figures and hitting everything in the air when not giving the strike to Chris. Quite often that meant out of the ground, but he did offer a catch to the best cricketer on the field, who dropped it. There were some mutterings on the lines of “what happened to retiring at 100?”, which was a convention that hadn’t actually been mentioned by anybody. We don’t make enough hundreds to have conventions about them. Their wicketkeeper made 120 against us a few years ago. We did not have the match won at this stage at all: with only nine to field and good batsmen and short boundaries, anything under 250 was eminently gettable. Eventually Matthew did retire to give Manoj a go, and when Chris also got to 100 he did the same in favour of Dominic, who was stumped off the last ball.

Bill Owen’s Sri Lankan, Sam, was the main danger. He has played against us three times, making 0 (second ball), 0 (first ball) and 0. We always knew we would have to pay for that. Doug and later David came in for considerable stick. Dominic bowled briskly and got some bounce, oddly described as “bodyline” by their wicketkeeper, who is a very good batsman and perfectly capable of coping with much more advanced stuff; but he wasn’t cheap either. Chris was more economical and he and Gregory, coming on to bowl the twelfth over with 110 on the board, really did slow the scoring. The first real difference, though, was made by Manoj, who ran the wicketkeeper out with quite a lot of help from Sam. Moreover, he and Gregory between them devised a plan of Ashley Giles-like negativity. With so few fieldsmen you cannot protect both sides of the field, so Gregory bowled to a point, a deep extra cover and a packed leg side, at leg stump from over the wicket. Very soon, Sam lost patience and gloved a sweep. Matthew ran and dived and slid a glove under the falling ball. Soon after, he stretched with the other glove to catch a fast edge off Chris. There was still one dangerous batsman left, but only one and despite dropping him a couple of times we kept control and hurried through the last overs as the sun set. The final blow was delivered by David, who removed him with a spectacular return catch as his feet slid from under him.