Venturers Vs BaNES, Tuesday May 14th

BaNES 124-7, Venturers 89-7

In just over a thousand Test matches, only one man (Monty Panesar) has ever been run out without facing a ball while batting for England. It happens rather more often here. The opener for BaNES attempted a third off the third ball and was defeated by Olly’s fast though not very accurate throw from the deep and an adroit flick on to the stumps by the wicket-keeper, Josh. We didn’t really take advantage of this, although we didn’t bowl badly. The odd ball would stick in the pitch a little, and it was generally slow. The left-hander who came in at three is fairly short and thus able to pull anything even slightly underpitched. He plays the shot well: Olly, who bowled well most of the time, fed it occasionally. Matt S didn’t drop short, and picked up wickets.

Because of the balls that stopped, there were a lot of skied catches in this match. We caught some of them: Matt R took a particularly good one, and Chris M made a very droppable one from the left-hander look very droppable without actually dropping it. We also grassed a couple. There was generous but slow turn when we tried spin, too slow to be much use really.

Apart from the openers, it was Dan who was our most effective bowler. He and Matt S had identical figures, but Dan was quite ordinary until at the start of his third over he fell over at the bowling crease for no visible reason at all. Like Antaeus thrown to the ground by Heracles, he gained strength from this contact with the nurturing earth and thereafter conceded no more runs and took two more wickets. The last of these was a straightforward case of a batsman missing a straight ball, but the other was an actual bona fide slip catch. We do post slips from time to time but they are there, if not purely for decoration, to tidy up when the wicketkeeper fluffs. If they do get a catch it is nearly always one that has lobbed over the wicketkeeper from a top edge or the back of the bat. This wasn’t. It was a genuine edge that flew, admittedly more like a pigeon than a swallow, to Gregory’s left. He caught it competently with both hands. We can’t actually remember the last time we caught a slip catch properly. The effects, though, were minimal: after Dan and Gregory ran out of overs we rather leaked runs, and ended up with a run a ball to chase, which seemed like a tall order on a slow pitch.

We didn’t have a run-out, but we did lose Josh and Rob very quickly. Farooq and Steve kept us in the game and avoided run-outs by not running unless it would be embarrassing not to, and sometimes not even then. As more wickets at this point would have been disastrous, there was something to be said for such caution. On the other hand it did lead to a rising required run rate and, in due course, when Farooq’s patience gave out, another skier. They didn’t catch those any more reliably than we did, but they did catch this one. Matt R got a good ball early on, and after that we slowly slid behind the rate. The problem was that you couldn’t deliberately accelerate: both Matt S and Steve got in, but without taking absurd risks couldn’t find a way to get on. We lost a couple of wickets near the end, making the score look slightly worse than it was, but we were nowhere near the asking rate.