Bathford Vs Venturers, Wednesday May 25th

Venturers 69; Bathford 70-5

The main thing, if you have been bowled out for 69, is not to give runs away in the field. We did, doing some damage to our always slender winning chances and more to Dave’s figures. The culprits were Gregory, who half-stopped the ball and then watched it run away down the slope; Bruce, who had been hard to get past till then but simply missed the line; and Imran, who fell over altogether. Imran wasn’t the only one: Ajay earlier sat down suddenly in his bowling stride, possibly in protest at something or other.

On the whole we bowled quite well, in fact. Ian and Imran kept the openers not so much quiet as silent. In due course Ian bowled one of them. The new batsman hit three effortless fours and was then torpedoed by Imran’s inducker. Gregory bowled two balls from over the wicket, watched them spin wildly down leg, switched to round and immediately flicked the top of the other opener’s middle stump. Steve Dent uncomfortably blocked the next two balls, and in the following over was run out spectacularly by Jack’s direct hit. At that point, so slow was the run rate, it even seemed as if we might win, but we needed wickets and the nearest we got was a miscued pull that dropped some distance over Bruce’s head. We tried Pratik, whose spell was relatively uneventful but who might be a handful on drier pitches should we ever get any, Ajay and eventually Dave; but nothing worked until the Bathford captain, half of whose runs could be blamed on our fielding, top-edged Dave, and Imran caught the resulting skier. By then, though, they needed only two more runs from five overs.

So the problem was really that we hadn’t made enough runs. We knew that. It started well enough, with first Jack and then Ajay briefly monopolising the scoring, but they each got out in turn and thereafter there was a slow slide down the celebrated Bathford hill. Ian dug his heels in and put his weight back as the scree rolled past him, but then Simon ran him out and the only contribution from the last five was Gregory’s largely accidental single.