Allsorts Vs Venturers, Sunday August 9th

Somerset Allsorts 177-4, Venturers 60

If you play cricket enough you begin to pick up a bit of cricket-Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi and then the trick of the captain instructing the bowler secretly in that language stops working. So when what became the last ball of the match came along, Gregory knew perfectly well that it was a slower ball and he was expected to slog and miss it. He slogged and missed it, perfectly encapsulating the whole innings. We knew what to do. We just utterly failed to do it.

Even the opposition’s progress to 177 was a bit like that. Ian gave nothing away, of course, but Jerome, knowing not to bowl one loose ball an over, still did. Bruce, used in the middle overs for once, perhaps did not know quite what to do. The thing about Bruce’s bowling is that it is quite easy to score four an over off it, and you might get more if he bowls a bad ball, but deliberately getting any more than that is very difficult. So at the end of a 20-over match, when four an over won’t do, he is very effective, but in the middle of an afternoon match it may not work. Today it didn’t. Imran and Gregory were a bit less leaky, but the openers were still there at the drinks interval and two balls after that one of them hit Gregory into the pavilion. An over later he tried again and hit it into long-on’s hands, where it did not remain; but soon after that his team-mates decided they were bored watching him and insisted that he give somebody else a go. The other opener twice walked past balls from Gregory: Jamie dropped the first one but completed the stumping the second time.

At that point the scoring almost stopped. Seven overs from Gregory and Ian cost only seven runs; Imran returned to his usual accuracy; and the Maggs family did the rest, with a coda in which Bruce returned and did what he does best. Both Gavin and Archie collected their first wickets for the Venturers: Gavin’s came through a good catch by Archie.

Forty overs to make 178 seemed like something we could approach. The pitch, which had played very well to begin with, had shown some strange bounce later in their innings, so it wasn’t going to be straightforward, but we felt we had a good chance. Charlie got a slightly fortuitous single from the second ball: Jaideep, neither forward nor back, was bowled by the third. It didn’t bounce much, but he played inside it. And from there it spiralled down. Only Charlie, who got one that kept very low, could really complain of the pitch: certainly not Jamie, who tried to cut one that was far too close to him and chopped on; nor Farooq, who hit a full toss to cover; nor Ian, who was run out. Gavin, Archie and Imran all looked as if they might stay and then didn’t; the rest of us didn’t even look like staying. Nobody reached double figures.