Venturers Vs Royal Oak, Wednesday June 19th

Venturers 113-5 (20), Royal Oak 115-4 (18.2)

Krish clumped the third ball of the innings to midwicket, after Jonathan had got off the mark with a lot of hip and a scrape of glove from the first. The opening bowlers were mostly pretty good and Rubbaniy and Jonathan did well not to lose any more wickets for quite a long time. Jonathan accumulated. Rubbaniy does sometimes hit it quite a long way and after he did that a couple of times the opposition seemed to expect him to retire. No such agreement had been made, and the plea that they entered, that evening matches without a retirement rule are unknown, is not sustainable. This match would have been much less interesting with such a rule, because after Rubbaniy got bowled for 43 we didn’t in reality have a lot more. Jonathan was run out by the bowler from a sitting position. Farooq, Steve, Parth and Mizan all contributed a few, but the bowlers kept things tight and 113 felt like less than we would need.

Imran gave us some hope by bowling one opener, and Parth did rather more than that with three wickets in an over. Two were bowled (one kept a bit low) and the third was a good low catch by Krish, a makeshift wicketkeeper for the evening. But there was a distinctly good batsman left, as well as a slogger who was quite good at that if he was given the chance. Gregory confused the latter but didn’t get him out. Mizan confused us by setting a 6-3 offside field and then bowling offbreaks at the stumps. That worked about as well as you would expect, and we didn’t ever manage to push the run rate up despite Jonathan’s tidy bowling. They were already not far off when the more technically adept batsman hit a drive towards long-off and twisted his knee setting off for the routine single. Jonathan took Mizan’s throw and broke the stumps but by then we all knew something was wrong. The injured batsman limped off, and the two sloggers who were then at the crease finished the match briskly. We walked off and were greeted by their captain’s parents, who were handing out cake in celebration of their wedding anniversary.

We felt that we had been fifteen runs light and that we had allowed them another dozen or so through avoidable errors such as misplaced fielders. On the other hand, we had fielded well: in particular, nothing ever got past either Bruce or Hirshith. And in any case, we would probably have lost even defending 140 if it had not been for the injury. It would have been the wrong result if they hadn’t won.