A few weeks ago new Romsey signing Tom Woolford brought up the possibility of an all day game against the Trinity College fellows. Despite it being a weekday, two elevens were duly selected and assembled at what has become Romsey's de facto home ground, Trinity's Old Field site on Grange Road. With a splendid tea all ready and waiting, the only thing that could go wrong was the weather . . . and sadly the forecast was for rain (a prediction backed up by the presence of thick, grey clouds over Cambridge for most of the day).
Still, come match time it was yet to rain, and so Romsey headed out into the field to see about restricting Trinity to a reasonable total (and to our their fitness, since it was to be a declaration game, and there was the possibility of fielding for more than 40 overs for the first time in living memory). We did have some triumphs, such as Oliver Rex (1/??) bowling a fiery spell that accounted for Tom Woolford, Adrian Mellish (1/??) backing up his tight bowling with a superb outfield catch, and Arnie Garside topping that with an even better outfield catch of his own. Other than that, though, we were rather let down by some poor fielding (perhaps the ground was still infected from Saturday) and our dropped catches allowed Trinity to declare on 228/7 after (count them) 47 overs.
During the tea break it was becoming increasingly clear that the rain was going to come; the only questions were "when?" and "how much?". The answers were, respectively, "after one over of Romsey's innings" and "too much" - despite lots of optimistic work with Trinity's high-tech covers the game was beyond saving. The overall summary: it was fun while it lasted, and let's do it again next year.