UBVCC Vs Venturers, Wednesday September 2nd

Venturers 101-6, UBVCC 105-1

Students of P.G.Wodehouse will recognise this situation:

“Plank? Did you tell her you were Major Plank?” “I did.” “Are you Major Brabazon-Plank, the explorer?” “I am.” “So am I”, said the gentleman, evidently rather impressed by the coincidence.

Our opponents called themselves BUVCC, and when asked what that stood for, they claimed to be Bath University Venturers Cricket Club. We were impressed by the coincidence, showed them our constitution and our history, which goes back before their parents were probably born, never mind them, and agreed to play a match against them on condition that they stopped pretending to be us. Not that that will necessarily help. The Indian wicketkeeper Wriddhiman Saha recently tweeted plaintively that he had been banned from Facebook for pretending to be Wriddhiman Saha.

It quickly became clear that they could never convince anybody that they were us. They were much too good at cricket. Perhaps they had stopped pretending to be us, and were pretending to be Wriddhiman Saha instead. That would account for the fact that when they were bowling the difference wasn’t quite so obvious. All of our batsmen got a start, and the only problem was the scoring rate. We did lose wickets regularly, and Ritvij’s 20 was the top score, but we didn’t have to use Alex, who can bat, let alone Bruce or Gregory. Or Imran, who had missed his train and never showed up.

Imran was missed when we started to bowl. Only three overs went for less than ten: CB’s first, and both of Bruce’s. Exactly one ball, from Gregory, went past the bat: Alex missed it and it may have brushed the leg stump on the way. The only wicket fell when the opener retired after reaching fifty off twenty-one balls and the new batsman drove his first ball, also from Gregory, into mid-on’s hands. Even then, mid-on was their captain, filling in for Imran. At one point the ball got lost altogether in the nearby woods (the match was at Brownswords, next to Beckford’s Tower). We did drop a catch early on but we don’t think that catching it would have made much difference.