Report by Daniel Mortlock:
After a week off today was a chance to see we could extend our winning streak to, er, two. The early signs weren't good - A text went around on Friday announcing "hi all we are one short at moment any idea let me know cheers andy", and we didn't get our eleventh player 'til about two hours before match time. To make things worse, two of our number would have to leave early, so we were desperate to bowl first so we'd have a full complement in the field. To add to the pre-toss excitement, rumour had it that Great Chisill were in the same position . . . but their skipper called wrongly, and so we headed out to see what use our faster (if mostly not actually fast) bowlers could make of the hard new ball . . .
. . . on which score it was something of a surprise to see Russell Woolf (2/47) given the second over. Not that he didn't do a fine job, mind - he conceded just 2 runs - but the state of the ball isn't really critical to his flight-based method of deception. The explanation was that Matt Commin, despite having arrived at the ground well before the start of play, was still fiddling around in the changing rooms, only coming on at the end of the first over. A great debate then ensued: could he bowl straight away, or did he have to wait for as long as he'd been off the ground? We're all used to the latter rule from professional games, but the key difference there is that most international sides have a twelfth man to act as substitute fielder, whereas we'd had just then ten players for the first six balls. Logically it should have been fine for Matt to bowl straight away, and the opposition weren't bothered . . . but Andy was convinced it was against the rules, and so Matt had to wait.
It was worth the wait, though, as he steamed in off his long run and delivered one of the fastest spells in club history. His eventual figures of 10 overs, 3 maidens, 3/32 were perfectly respectable, but hardly did justice to the difficulties he gave the Great Chisill batsmen. There were endless edges, mis-hits and just plain misses, and if we'd had pro-level slips fielders then it would have been an easy five-for. As it was, though, Great Chisill weathered this early storm well and made it to a very healthy 56/0 after 12 overs before, in a wonderful touch of irony, the first breakthrough was made by Russ, now bowling at the other end.
We got a couple more quick wickets, but there were a few too many loose balls, meaning that at drinks it was a pretty even game, with Great Chisill 86/3 off 20 overs. Russ was all set to continue after drinks, having gone so far as to give his cap to the umpire, when Daniel Mortlock suddenly had the egotistical brain-wave that he should bowl, the logic being that the batsmen might be a bit relaxed after the break and could be vulnerable to a surprise increase in pace. One off-stump yorker later that theory was vindicated, Daniel going some way to rescuing his day's figures - but even if his evental 3/51 was a bit expensive, it did mean he became the third Romsey player to take 200 league wickets. (The other two players in the "200 wicket club" - Andy, with 434, and Rog with 214 - were both playing today, and the odds are that Russ, with 188 recorded wickets, would be on that list as well if we hadn't lost some of our old scorebooks.)
We were making steady progress through the Great Chisill middle order, but couldn't get rid of the suriviving opener who, presumably due to his lack of partners, was starting to open his shoulders and take more risks. The lack of partners was primarily down to our good bowling, Olly Rex (0/26) being unlucky to go wicketless and Rog Shelley (2/17) being unlucky not to have gotten more. We bowled well enough that we probably should have been able to keep the scoring rate lower, but our fielding effort was mixed at best. The situation was summed up when, after a fall of wicket, Andy called the team together for that rarest of events, a Romsey huddle, rightly giving a general purpose bollocking that we needed to be attacking the ball harder. To our credit - and Andy's - we did up our game towards the end, Catherine Owen, Dave Clark and Cameron Petrie all notably saving second runs when we were trying to keep the above-mentioned opener off strike. And while plenty of chances (ranging between takeable and seriously challenging) went down, we did at least take three catches, Andy holding onto an edge while standing up to Russ, Russ himself holding onto a blinder at mid-wicket, and Daniel taking a daving return catch that inevitably meant scraping the latest scab off "this season's knee" again. The end result was that we bowled out Great Chisill with an over to go, although their total of 178 was maybe 20-odd more than we should have let them get. For that, though, huge credit to their dogged opener, R. Brunt, who scored an invaluable 81 and went within 6 balls of batting through the innings.
Our chase began with controversy when Matt Commin was subject to a huge appeal for caught behind: he didn't walk; the umpire didn't think he'd hit the ball . . . but the fielders were adamant, one remonstrating at length with Nick Clarke about "playing in the right spirit" and invoking the fact that one of their batsman had walked when he'd got an edge. Why he chose to bring this up with Nick was a bit of a mystery - the non-striker doesn't have much of a say in proceedings - but his grumbles were made to look even sillier in the next few overs as no fewer than four of our top five (including Matt) got thin edges through to the 'keeper and instantly walked. (To the credit of the Great Chisill player in question, he later apologised to Nick.)
An apparent corollary of the above is that a collapse was in progress, but the calm centre at all of this was Nick, for whom all this drama was water off a duck's back. Indeed, he was scoring so fast that when he was clapped for reaching his half-century those of us out on the ground dismissed the applause as being some sort of anomaly, and while he was at the crease the Romsey innings was in rude health. (Although the same can't be said for Nick himself, as he was suffering from acutely sunburnt buttocks after a sunbathing mishap earlier in the week.)
When Nick was dismissed (for an invaluable 55) it was "game on" again. It now fell to Daniel Mortlock (26) and Olly Rex (35) to consolidate which, after some early scares, they did superbly. The Great Chisill change bowlers sent down one "four ball" most overs, with the result that Daniel and Olly put on 60 runs at more than a run a ball. At the end of the 26th over we were on 139/4, and needed just 40 runs off 78 balls with 6 wickets in hand . . .
. . . from which point we collapsed like a Greek bank, losing our last 6 wickets for just 27 runs in 10 horrific overs. The competition for "most horrific dismissal" was fierce, although two contenders stood out from the field. The first was Olly being called through for a suicidal run when we were so far ahead of the required rate that only our wickets mattered; the second was Andy being rapped on the pad and the umpire apparently correctly declining the appeal, only to change his mind when he misinterpreted the batsman's compsure-gathering walk to square-leg as just a walk, after which he fatally raised his finger. There was no salvation from there: none of our last five made more than Andy's 6, and even as our final wicket fell the required run rate was still just 2.29 an over.
Horrible as our late-innings collapse was, though, the thin margin can maybe be traced back to those edges: whereas most of the Great Chisill batsmen's edges fortuitously flew to safety, it really was insanely unlucky that we managed four such civilised snicks (all of the sort that don't deviate appreciably, hence making them eminently catchable). If even one of those deliveries had passed a millimetre further from the bat then the odds are we'd have scored the 13 more runs we needed . . .