After having spent four seasons fighting valiantly to stay up in the Junior 2 League, Romsey Town finally succumbed this year, our fate finally being sealed by a run out from the penultimate ball of the last match of the season. Even more annoyingly we would have been safe in any other year but The Cambridgeshire Cricket Association's somewhat anarchic league restructuring scheme meant that the bottom four teams, rather than just the bottom two, were relegated.
That said, there were plenty of highlights along the way, starting with a healthy influx of seven new players who, between them, made 35 league appearances for us this year. Two of them, Jon Steele and Marcelino Gopal, were our only half-century makers; and, by adding 17 wickets at 18.71 to his 246 runs at 22.36, Marcelino was a shoo-in as players' player of the year. The other awards, however, went to old hands, Andy Owen (250 runs at 31.25) topping the batting averages yet again, while Russell Woolf (11 wickets at 17.64) won the bowling averages for a second time. The other exceptional individual effort was Tom Jordan's match-winning spell of 5/15 in the nail-biting win against Abington which led into a great mid-season run of three-wicket victories that was only broken when we failed to chase the none-too-daunting target of 125 set by Audley End.The league aside, our fixture list was also book-ended by a couple of friendlies (the last of which was brilliant day-long multi-innings beer-dominated thrashing of NCI on Parker's Piece) and we also made a triumphant appearance at the six-a-side competition, going through the day undefeated to get our first silverware in 16 years. And just maybe we'll have the chance to collect some more next year -- if we really are good enough for Juinor 2, then surely winning Junior 3 should be a cinch . . .