Having started our season by being thrashed by Elsworth, we had to at least hope we could give a better account of ourselves today.
Early doors it seemed we might as Rog Shelley (0/30) conceded just 2 runs from his first 14 balls and Ferdi Rex (1/52) bowled one of the Elsworth openers . . . but from there it was pretty hard going as their third-wicket pair hit a half-century and a century, respectively, all while scoring at a run a ball. Darren Wood (2/31) and Himanshu Agrawal (2/60) both got a couple of wickets, but it wasn't enough to stop Elsworth racking up an imposing total of 254/6 from their 40 overs.
We also lost an early wicket, after which Rod Dennis (40 off 91 balls) and Roy Page (59 off 63) balls put together a superb consolidatory partnership, which took us all the way to 113/1 in the 26th over. Batting first that would have been a superb situation, but unfortunately here it meant we needed to score at about 10 an over for the rest of the innings. The predictable result was that we lost some wickets by taking risks, but we also started scoring at close to the required rate as Olly Rex (50 off 36 balls), Himanshu Agrawal (10 off 11 balls), Andy Owen (15 off 11 balls) and Ferdi Rex (15* off 20 balls) all put the Elsworth bowling to the sword. We scored 114 from our last 84 balls, which was a great effort . . . but in the end Elsworth just had too many runs to defend.