BaNES Vs Venturers, Wednesday June 15th

Venturers 134-5, BaNES 135-5

On arrival at the Lansdown ground, where we played this match, it is compulsory to talk about Viv Richards, who spent a summer playing for Lansdown when he was about seventeen. The ground is not very big. Farooq hit the ball out of it more than once, and one must assume that most of the hospital was a hard hat area when Richards was batting.

BaNES like a retire-at-50 rule, which doesn’t matter too much in a 20-over game. Rules like that can further disadvantage the weaker side, if they have only one capable batter and the other side have more, and it worked out against us in practice, but we weren’t obviously weaker. Perhaps we were a bit slow to adjust to the conditions. Sushil got us off to a flying start after we had been put in, with two fours in the first over, but was then embarrassingly leg before to the first ball of the second over, a slow straight full toss. Harsh was bowled in the same over by a much better ball, and Yashpal, looking very uncomfortable, was cleaned up early in the third over. Yash looked on wonderingly from the nonstriker’s end. The score was 11 for 3, and he had opened the innings and was 0 not out off one ball.

Yash continued to look on wonderingly as Farooq did his Richards impression, making 57 out of a partnership of 78 in eleven overs. The quicker opening bowler was pretty good, but we did notice that when Yash, and slightly later Farooq, did get something hittable it almost always went for four. The ball comes on to the bat, and the outfield is fast. Yash found the slower bowlers harder to hit, but Farooq had the distance to be able to put the ball in the air if he preferred. He retired according to the pact at the end of the over in which he reached 50; Akshay drilled his second ball to cover; and it was left to Simon and Yash to try to accelerate, or at least limit the deceleration. It sounded like a promising partnership. Yash is very quick between the wickets and is gradually learning not to Charleston out of the way of anything just outside leg stump, though he is not always sure what to do instead. Today he tried the Moonwalk; next time it might be Kathakali or the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. We would prefer him to use the bat, either for an elegant deflection to fine leg or for just thumping it. Simon has a knack of timing the ball on slow pitches when nobody else can. The trouble was that the pitch wasn’t slow, negating Simon, and the outfield was so fast that there weren’t many quick singles. They still did all right: Yash hit a six of his own (a technical drop, but the fielder was out of backpedalling room) and eventually ran himself out almost deliberately, going for a ridiculous bye with two balls left. Saad picked up a single off the last ball.

We weren’t going to defend 134 on this ground by just keeping the runs down. We needed wickets. Akshay certainly threatened them but it was Saad who broke through, with a miscue that Akshay caught at midwicket. A similar miscue off Akshay fell out of reach, but Yashpal’s attempt to get there and then turn away when he realised he couldn’t brought him down with a damaged knee. He watched the rest of the match with an ice pack on it from the benches, and was still struggling to move at the end of the match, but he thinks he will recover fairly soon. Alex had had to drop out so by now our opponents were lending us two fielders, and one of them missed a very hard chance offered by Ajay, a frequent opponent for many teams who has also played for us occasionally. He is difficult to bowl to because he doesn’t do anything stupid. With this shot he lost the ball, mysteriously as we heard it clang off the fence but then couldn’t find it in the not very thick vegetation. The problem was that Saad and Akshay leaked runs. If they had got one more wicket each – Akshay bowled the other opener – we would have been in good shape, but as it was they handed over to Gregory and Bruce after seven overs with the score past 70. Here we got lucky. Gregory’s third ball was a full toss but the batter picked out Farooq at deep square leg. There was less luck about what followed, an impeccable maiden from Bruce, nor about the offbreak with which Gregory drew the most dangerous of the remaining batsmen down the pitch and bowled him. But that was as good as it got, because Ajay found a sensible partner and they took the runs that were available, which were more than enough, instead of chasing ones that weren’t there. Farooq, also threatening but a bit quicker, was correspondingly more expensive. Yash induced a simple return catch – simple once he had bundled Ajay, the non-striker, out of the way – and two more quiet overs, or two more wickets, would have made things interesting. But the new batsman, though all at sea against Yash, ended the match with a series of drives against Farooq, and stranded Ajay on 48.