Failand Allsorts Vs Venturers, Sunday June 2nd

Venturers 147-10 (39), Failand Allsorts 105-10 (39.1)

The Failand ground is picturesque and inaccessible. Tobias rang from Bruce’s car to say that they were lost, and was given the postcode, which does find it. On one side of the ground is a stone wall. You can see the Severn and the Welsh hills as you climb over it to get the ball back, for it is not at all far from the pitch. On the other, downhill, side, the boundary is a long way, except for a bight around the pavilion. A tree stands well within the playing area: four runs are scored if you hit it, but nobody did. Imran rightly admired the horses that canter in the field below. That was after he had failed to find his way to the ground before the toss. Gregory lost it: we were put in, but would have batted anyway.

Failand is run by Maurice. His knee does not allow him to play at the moment, or rather, he couldn’t think how to explain to his physiotherapist what had happened if he did. That and some other unavailability had left them a bit short: we lent them Bruce and Tobias, and somebody else lent them two schoolboys. We weren’t about to underestimate the schoolboys, but we thought we had a fairly strong team. Eighty overs were to be bowled, with an expectation of a declaration after about half of them and a tacit agreement that nobody should bowl more than eight, but there was a draw. So we needed to bowl them out to win.

The first ball was a gentle full toss outside leg. Jaideep tried to tap it down to fine leg but hit it sooner and harder than he intended. It carried most of the way to the Welsh wall, where one of the schoolboys caught it calmly. Kamal played one slightly mistimed drive for four and then walked past a not very remarkable ball. He spun round and dabbed his bat down but not in time to beat the wicketkeeper’s inelegant lob at the stumps. Bowling at the other end was Lee, who gives nothing away with either ball or bat, so when he did drop a fraction short, Shreyas felt obliged to cut. It was too close to him for the shot and the wicketkeeper gathered his thin edge. Mizan hit the wall once but then flicked a catch to the schoolboy who had caught Jaideep. We needed a score from Ritvij. The other schoolboy had a bowl: brisk medium, good seam position. Ritvij stretched forward, not quite covering the off stump. A bit of seam movement proved that.

We were 26-5. There was a short boundary. Joji and Tom were batting: after that Parth, who can bat; Dinesh, who knows how it is done; Imran, who can hit a bit; and Gregory. Fifty all out was a distinct possibility, especially when Joji, still on nought, lofted a ball towards Bruce at wide mid-on. Bruce backpedalled and jumped, but it cleared him by a fair bit. If he had turned straight away he might just have got there, but that would have required very precise judgement: in truth, Joji had got just enough bat on it. He and Tom rebuilt for a while, but then Tom hit a four and tried to do it again. The ball stopped a bit, as it had done for Mizan, and one of the schoolboys caught it. Gregory handed umpiring duties to Jaideep and went to put his pads on.

He needn’t have hurried. Parth played well, Joji settled, and after a while Failand decided to give Bruce and Tobias a bowl. Bruce is dangerous if attacked: the lack of pace and the wobble make it much harder than it looks to hit him any distance, and much easier to put the ball in the air or miss altogether. But Joji and Parth of course knew that, and as there was plenty of time they simply waited for opportunities. This suited Parth’s fairly orthodox style: it was perhaps more of an effort for Joji. Tobias is somewhat similar to Bruce as a bowler, so they didn’t have to approach the bowlers in different ways. Joji did hit one over the wall, but mostly they accumulated.

We were already approaching a possibly respectable total by the time Joji was hit on the pads and given out instantly by Maurice. Instant decisions mean one of two things: hasty umpiring, or blatantly out. This was the latter: Joji did complain mildly of the ball keeping low, but described it as hitting the middle of everything. Anyway, we didn’t mind some unpredictable bounce. Moreover, Dinesh had one of his good days with the bat and we were actually surprised when he and, soon after, Parth, got bowled. Imran refused Gregory permission to take his first run of the season, did his best to run him out, slogged a four and was bowled trying to do it again.

We had some confidence in our ability to defend 147, but then we had had some confidence in our top-order batting at the start of the match. Amir, another familiar opponent, opened along with one of the schoolboys. Imran and Dinesh kept them very quiet indeed for eight overs. It is difficult for a bowling captain to assess his own bowling, but Imran got it right: he recognised that he had done enough containing to create some scoreboard pressure, but wasn’t the person to exploit it and neither, yet, was Dinesh. Instead he tried Joji for one over, then Tom, then Mizan and then Gregory. Of these Mizan was by far the most threatening: Tom was largely harmless and Gregory slightly erratic. The schoolboy edged Mizan fast to slip, where Jaideep held on. The non-Maurice umpire told us that we had made a mistake by doing that: the new batsman was Sam, a more than capable Sri Lankan. Sam has something of a history against the Venturers, going back perhaps a decade. His first three innings against us were ducks; his fourth, 97 (but we won). This time he was completely at sea: against Gregory, he swept three times, getting one four and two top edges both of which landed safe; against Mizan, he pushed hopefully forward and often missed. Ritvij nearly ran him out, and overreacted when Maurice turned the appeal down (and Maurice was right: replays, had they been possible, might perhaps have shown it as out, but it was at best too close to give out with the naked eye). Amir, however, was playing well, and Sam is too good a player to let a shaky start bother him.

At the drinks interval there was a discussion, and we decided to try Ritvij’s pace against Amir. It should have worked in the second over: he hit a hard drive uppishly to the right of short cover. Gregory reacted quickly and got the ball in both hands but somehow spilt it. But an over later Amir did the same thing only squarer, this time picking out Parth, who did not make the same mistake. Sam pushed forward to Mizan and missed again, but this was a straight one. Now we were no longer in real danger of losing, because the score was barely fifty and all but one of the remaining batsmen were not naturally aggressive. Bowling them out, though, was going to be a challenge.

The next attempt at aggression, though, came from the wicketkeeper, who tried to launch Mizan and missed. The more naturally aggressive player sensibly kept things calm, until he flicked at Ritvij and denounced Shreyas and Jaideep as clowns when Shreyas claimed a catch. It hadn’t in fact hit anything (maybe top of pad) but it wasn’t a crazy appeal. Ritvij, either out of filial piety or because he thinks that if his father is a clown it is his job to say so, bowled him a few balls later.

But now we had a problem. The other schoolboy was at the other end, and he was playing inconveniently well. The idea that they might win had gone, so he knew his job: just bat, and don’t get out. And Lee had come in, and we have had draws before now because of not being able to break through his technique. It was quite likely that we would get no further wickets. But Lee doesn’t like being on nought. He pushed the ball back past the bowler and set off: Dinesh hared in from mid-on and shied at the non-striker’s end, not worrying about the short boundary beyond it. He hit, and we were through to the tail. Sort of. Next was Steve, the Failand captain: a good bowler and capable batsman. We needed four wickets in about eleven overs. We made no progress. We tried Dinesh again, Joji again and, for one over, Gregory with no outfielders. They did attack that, damaging Gregory’s already rather unimpressive figures, and that was probably a dangerous thing to do, but they got away with it. And then, for no obvious reason, Steve ran himself out, taking on Parth’s arm for a second that was not needed. Parth’s good throw and Shreyas’s quick hands were enough. Dinesh bowled the new batsman first ball. Now we had the schoolboy and Tobias. Tobias missed his first two but then started to look more comfortable; and then Joji suddenly produced a ball to match the one that had bowled Ritvij.

So Bruce came out to join Tobias. We were still not confident. There were four overs left. Tobias plays straight. Bruce will not do anything silly (he would play his own bowling very well). Imran to Bruce, or Gregory to Tobias (a left-hander) would have been options, but Dinesh and Joji had enough overs left so Imran just left them on. We crowded them, but not enough: Tobias pushed a catch to short mid-off, where there was nobody. But with the first ball of the last over but one, Joji flicked Tobias’s off bail and we had won.