Monkton Cavaliers Vs Venturers, Wednesday April 24th

Monkton Cavaliers 128-2, Venturers 62-6

It was still April and there had been light steady showers during the afternoon, however the benefit of covered pitches and good grounds-keeping enabled the game to go ahead. The sun came out and it turned into a lovely evening. Given the early season and that it was the first day of a new term, a later start and reduced 18 over game was agreed, this still proved to be too many overs.

Monkton won the toss and decided to use the remaining daylight to bat, which was very sensible though ultimately not the deciding factor. CB and James started the bowling well keeping the scoring tight and limiting Monkton to 20 from the first 5 overs, though without a wicket the batsmen soon found their stride. The change of bowlers brought a breakthrough from Allan’s right arm around the wicket, closely followed by one for George who managed to limit the scoring for a few overs. Unfortunately these were the only wickets we managed to take, and after 68-2 from 10 overs the only danger Monkton faced to accumulating runs was when they retired their opener (who had scored 41), this however did not slow them down and they comfortably navigated to 128 from the 18 overs.

Any hope of a remarkable Venturers run chase ended almost before the innings had begun, partly due to trying to find enough pads for the early batting line up. When we did find enough equipment for the batsmen it proved that Monkton’s bowling was too good for ‘first game of the season’ batting, as first Josh then Fahad and closely followed by CB fell cheaply. From 17 for 3 off the first five overs, the unlikely run chase was made progressively more difficult when Jamie was caught trying to push the score along. Steve became increasingly assured the longer he spent batting. Scoring slowed down due to the fading light and what we suspect was Monkton’s frontline bowling attack coming on in the tricky conditions. We lost a couple more wickets but ultimately for the last 8-10 overs the batsmen were more concerned with self preservation in the fading light than what score we ended with. Which, for the interest of completeness, managed to inch to 62.