Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Summer, evidently, just isn't interested in Romsey Town CC. After matches played to a finish in miserable cold and then driving rain, we were once again confronted with solid cloud cover and the attendant competition to find second jumpers.
Every cloud, though, is meant to have a silver lining, and today's certainly did, as the new ball swung appreciably - at least until it's inevitable softening after a dozen or so overs. Still, that was enough time for Matt Commin (2/42), Daniel Mortlock (1/28) and Girish Lakhwani (2/52) to dismiss Thriplow's top order. Mid-way through the 16th over they were in desperate trouble at 55/5, and we were starting to eye up an early visit to the pub. All three bowlers had caused their share of trouble, and we'd backed them up in the field: Dave Clarke took a stunning one-handed grab at gully (although his claim that nothing gets past his left hand wasn't supported by subsequent events); Andy Owen completed a fantastic leg-side stumping standing up to Matt; Girish held a swirling skier off his own bowling; Nick was brilliant at short mid-off, never once getting onto the back foot; Rod Dennis made some brilliant stops at point (with his hands today); and the general sense of was healthily aggressive energy. Add in the fact we surely now had access to the non-batsmen, and it really was our match to lose . . .
. . . or maybe Thriplow's to make a fight of. Their sixth wicket pair buckled down, defending anything they didn't like the look of but chancing their arm on their favourite shots, the cut and on-drive, respectively. Girish, in particular, induced lots of edges, all of which fell into the increasingly small gaps in our slip cordon, and slowly a good rear-guard turned into an impressive counter-attack and from there into something even-more-hyphenated. Rog Shelley (0/19) went close to a breakthrough, and could have reasonably expected a longer spell; however the tactical decision to change gears all the way to spin was justified almost instantly when Faruk Kara (3/33) induced a mis-hit drive that was superbly held by Richard Rex at long-off. When Dave and Andy also held good catches of Faruk's bowling the score was 1??/8 and it seemed that we'd finally finished off Thriplow's innings.
Unfortunately, it had the sort of resilience all too familiar from horror films and, just like a "dead" body slowly stirring in the background of a shot, the Thriplow number 8 suddenly started smacking a series of huge "golf shots" in the arc between long-on and cow corner. He didn't have any such devestating option when we drew the length back, but we over-pitched a bit too much, and as a result we had a late-innings blow-out. Thriplow's eventual total of 188/8 represented an absurd comeback from the depths of 55/5, and it took a real effort of will to convince ourselves that we were in anything other than trouble.
Our chase started brightly, with Rod Dennis (9 off 26 balls) and Nick Clarke (14 off 19 balls) hitting some crisp boundaries before being dismissed, after which Richard Rex (20 off 54 balls) and Daniel Mortlock (32 off 55 balls) then knuckled down. Their slow scoring could in part be explained by Thriplow's good bowling, but their 36-run partnership took up too many overs (13, give or take a few balls), and in the period immediately after drinks our chase had reached crisis point.
The arrival of Matt Commin (14 off 16 balls) briefly provided some much-needed impetus and, maybe more importantly, some much-needed light relief. This included some fabulously cocky banter with the bowlers (e.g., "Well if you'd had a slip in I wouldn't have edged it!") and some hilariously, er, ambitious risky running between wickets. One quick single resulted in two separate overthrows and a general sense of cricketers running around around in random directions like electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus; several apparently certain run outs didn't come to pass as the ball flew within inches of the stumps (illustrating the important truth that club cricketers seldom manage the direct hits that we're all so used to seeing on TV); and - the absolute highlight - a crazy second run that saw the Thriplow keeper take the throw with Daniel still yards short of his ground, only for him to somehow drop the ball in the motion of smashing the stumps. Mid-way through the 30th over we were 101/3; needing 88 runs from 64 balls with two set batsmen we had to be some chance of pulling off the win . . .
. . . but at 101/5 at the end of the 30th over with two new batsmen at the crease we were pretty clearly stuffed. And so it turned out, our last 7 wickets going down for 26 runs as the batsmen perished attempting the near-impossible task of scoring rapidly from ball one against tight bowling. The game finished with Thriplow even more decisvely in the ascendancy than we had been for that first hour, oh so long ago . . .