Southstoke Vs Venturers, Sunday July 7th

Southstoke 153-7 (42), Venturers 157-7 (31.3)

A good team performance, this. Southstoke are unpredictable, but they played well this time. We were at Peasedown, where we haven’t done very well against anybody in the past. We agreed to play a 75 overs declaration/time match: that is, the side batting first may bat as long as they like if they aren’t bowled out, but have to bowl the other side out to win. So if you want to bat 70 overs you can do that, at the cost of making yourself unpopular and not winning.

The clever thing about this is that 75 is odd. That removes the idea that the declaration should be at the halfway point. It usually shouldn’t, because the idea is that the side batting second usually receive fewer overs, but have the advantage that they can win without getting ten wickets. All the same, if you have settled on 80 overs, the fielding side usually start getting twitchy when the 41st over starts and there is no declaration.

Sometimes the side batting first will declare before the halfway point, if they think they have enough runs and want time to get the wickets. That was never a possibility here, though, because we bowled well. Parth was especially good, with two wickets in his first five-over spell. He conceded 13 in those overs, eight of them in wides. Krish was even harder to score off. Hirshith gave away a few runs at the very beginning but soon settled and bowled consistently well thereafter. Gregory did the opposite and gave away very little until the last two balls of his (7-over) spell. Mizan was economical throughout: James bowled three tidy overs.

But there was no declaration. We had agree eight overs per bowler but they kept batting, seven down, for forty-one overs. When they decided on a forty-second, Gregory (the reluctant captain) bowled it himself rather than ask Jonathan. He conceded only three, but they declared anyway.

That left us 33 overs to chase 154 to win. When Jonathan hit his first ball to midwicket it looked well out of reach, but Southstoke’s own bowling resources were limited and we had a lot of batting. A lot of thought went into the batting order, so as to have as far as possible one solid player (Shreyas, Charlie) and one more aggressive one. Southstoke chipped away: Shreyas also chipped a catch, Krish was bowled behind his legs and had to have it explained to him what had happened. But they had contributed 16 each; Kamal made a characteristically manic 29, with three fours but also three threes; Siddhant and Rubbaniy both scored at a run a ball for a few overs. The decisive partnership was between Charlie and Parth. Their contrasting styles made it very difficult for the bowlers: Charlie pushed the ball into gaps and rotated the strike back to Parth, who played classical drives for four. Eventually, with some run-rate pressure still, they got it wrong and Charlie was run out. Mizan went in: with Parth going well, and Hirshith to come, we were favourites. Even if Gregory had had to bat we might have got there. A decision had been taken to push for the win, not the draw. We imagined that Mizan would largely leave it to Parth; but instead he made 11 himself from five balls, including the ninth three of the innings, and that was that.