With no league game today we were free to spend an afternoon playing Flyford Flavell, on tour from their usual base in ???. Unfortunately we - or at least Cambridge - proved very poor hosts by greeting our visitors with sufficiently torrential rain that several of our players didn't even bother leaving their homes. Certainly there was no chance of play starting on time, but a combination of patience and covers meant that we were able to play once the rain had stopped, and in the end we got in an only marginally shortened game. The only change was that the intial plan of both teams having two 20-over innings was reduced slightly to shorten the second innings to 15 overs each.
We bowled first and, while we struggled to take wickets, Himanshu Agrawal (0/9), Marcelino Gopal (1/19) and Oliver Rex (0/19) all kept the Flyford Flavell in check. Towards the end of the innings Darren Wood (2/7) made a couple of breakthroughs, and we were definitely the happier team at the first break.
Our innings was dominated by good 20-over knocks by Marcelino (37 off 19 balls) and Ferdinand Rex (32* off 32 balls); thanks primarily to these two we ended up with a handy 17-run lead.
Going back out to field again, we didn't do nearly as well as we had just an hour earlier. Despite Himanshu (2/13) and Marcelino (1/11) bowling well again and Andy Owen (0/7) being as economical as ever, Flyford Flavell scored at comfortably more than a run a ball, eventually setting us a neat target of 90 runs from 90 balls.
A few slow overs might have easily made our task difficult, but we threw off our malaise from the field and did it pretty easy in the end: Himanshu (35 off 33 balls) set things up before Andy (16* off 18 balls) and Ferdi (13* off 5 balls) saw us home with the best part of 3 overs to spare.
But possibly the real hero of the day was Darren for giving us a ground to play on when just about every other match in town was cancelled.