Combe Down Vs Venturers, Wednesday July 15th

Combe Down 146-5, Venturers 79-9

We were better prepared for this match than we have ever been for any match before. Eleven named people with their own kit and hand sanitiser arrived at the ground half an hour before the start of play. The crowd introduced herself to the track and trace register officer (Yameen, an ex- and still occasional Venturer) and promised that she would maintain a distance of one metre plus from another spectator if there was one. The rest of us spent the time practising hand-sanitising. There was an awkward ceremony in which a strange small metal disc of a type once used for buying goods was thrown in the air. Jamie elected to field. The weather felt like April anyway, though a bit warmer. We started on time.

Once we had started, things were not that far off normal. It took us a little while to become clear in our minds that we were supposed to play in the usual way until the ball was dead, at which point it was to be returned directly to the bowler: initially we felt that we should try to avoid fielding it if the bowler or wicket-keeper could do it. Chandrabhan and Ian G quickly put that idea down.

We lost the match straight away. It wasn’t obvious that that was what was happening, but one of the openers got off to something of a flyer and we never got back in the game. Chandrabhan bowled the other one fairly early on, but the left-hander who came next stayed for the rest of the innings and accumulated briskly, without ever cutting loose. The opener got very confused by Jamie’s changes of pace and gave him a hard return chance, as well as miscuing in the general direction of, but not nearly as far as, Farooq; but by the time Chandrabhan bowled him too, he had contributed 44 and the run rate was exploding. Jerome and Gregory did little to reduce it. They both bowled fairly well most of the time and then spoilt the effect with something very hittable. One of these, from Jerome, ended up on the wall that separates the ground from the road, a good eighty yards away. The left-hander played almost entirely to leg but just waited for a bad ball. The right-hander tried to clear another long boundary without waiting, and failed, Jamie taking a good catch in the deep. Total disaster was averted by the death bowlers, Ritvij and Bruce, who returned identical figures, far more economical than their predecessors’, by contrasting methods. Ritvij’s methods are invariably orthodox and he simply bowled line and length, hitting the stumps once. Bruce’s methods involve apparently random changes of pace, anywhere from briskish medium to donkey drop, and are so often effective that it can’t be luck any more. Another left-hander hit a swirling top edge to square leg, where Gregory from fine leg arrived just in time to miss it: soon afterwards he walked right past one and Ian, who had decided to risk standing up, stumped him.

Despite the strange conditions, which included a pause every six overs for a commercial break/tactical discussion/ball sanitisation/alcoholic handwashing, it was a fairly typical bowling performance; maybe a bit below standard, because of lack of practice. We fielded reasonably: both the missed catches were hard. Nobody, except possibly Ritvij, bowled well; nobody bowled badly. Our own innings was a bit more variable. The first ball, bowled by Ian Corrick, bounced twice and was thus a no-ball. The second sat up in a friendly way, and Charlie hit it to cover. He caught it, yelled politely in triumph, and was given a warning for singing. Jaideep and Jamie got the score moving immediately, but in the next over Yameen induced a drag-on from Jaideep. Jamie couldn’t do so much at Ian’s end, and although when he got back to facing Yameen he hit a couple of boundaries, straight after that Yameen bowled him too. Now Ritvij’s orthodoxy became a problem: his style isn’t made for an asking rate of nine an over. He resolved to turn the strike over as much as possible, but Farooq’s style is similar and the always stiff target rapidly disappeared into the impossible. They, Ian, Jerome and Chris all contributed a few runs and then got bowled, except for Ritvij, whose defence is sound enough for him to be LBW instead. At the very end Chandrabhan tried something more aggressive and was caught at deep mid-on, first ball. We avoided a couple of indignities: Bruce survived the hat-trick ball, and he and Gregory ensured that we didn’t quite get bowled out.