Report by Daniel Mortlock:
From the moment Eric Dier slammed home the final penalty in the England vs. Colombia World Cup shoot-out, cricket was always going to finish a distant second to football today. To that end Andy and his opposite number at Fulbourn negotiated a one-off format for today's game: we'd shorten the innings to 32 overs and start an hour early; between innings we (along with pretty much the entire population of Fulbourn) could hence watch the England's quarter final match against Sweden at the social club before starting the the second innings at roughly the normal time . . . provided there was no extra time or penalties.
We were put into bat, which was surprising enough in the hot conditions, but even moreso when Fulbourn rapidly revealed themselves to be a mess in the field. They seemed to have several players whose primary role was to be shouted at . . . which, in turn, wasn't completely surprising since about half our numerous early boundaries were facillitated by basic fielding errors. Rumour has it one of their players was scared of the ball, and one of his more loquacious teammates suggested he fielded "like he was riding a unicorn around Narnia". Easy runs were clearly ripe for the taking, and that's what our top order did: Richard Rex played some lovely cuts to race to 32 off 30 balls; Jeff Beaumont leathered 30 off 19 balls, mainly from booming drives; and then John Bowland (29 off 36 balls, on debut and on loan from Bluntisham) and Stephan van Eeden (18 off 20 balls) consolidated with some slightly more measured batting. Our run rate was comfortably above a run a ball, despite some decidedly unenterprising running - we'd get 20 more runs every week if we just backed up and kept track of which of the opposition boundary fielders can't get the ball back in without help from someone half way. At 120/3 after 18 overs we were eyeing up 200+ even in this abbreviated format, and Fulbourn still seemed to be expending as much energy on their internal conflicts as they were on trying to dismiss our batsmen.
But then came a couple of fatal errors: John called Stephan through for a nonexistent single; and Amit Kumar, on debut, was given out LBW second ball to a delivery most of us on the sidelines thought looked too high. 120/3 was now 120/5, which soon became 149 all out. Aside from the above gifts to the opposition, this collapse (probably not quite extreme enough to be a Romsey Collapse TM) can be traced to Fulbourn's change bowlers adhering to the simple virtue of bowling stump-to-stump and us failing to adhere to the comparably simple virtue of playing with a straight bat. Our last four wickets all fell to cross-bat swipes, while Daniel Mortlock (13* off 14 balls) survived primarily because he didn't attempt even one.
Not that this seemeed remotely important for the next few hours as everyone (except for Richard, who opted to read a book instead) watched England complete a remarkably drama-free 2-0 victory over Sweden, thus securing a semi-final place for the first time since 1990.
The patriotic euphoria was wonderful, but that couldn't magically change the fact that we'd all been standing around for two hours in a stuffy room before going out to field, and it was a rather stiff and slow-moving Romsey side that took to the field. Our now-regular opening combination of Daniel Mortlock (1/29) and Stephan van Eeden (0/7) both bowled well, but struggled to generate real chances as the Fulbourn batsmen played with enviable discipline. We hence opted instead to take the pace off the ball, but this approach didn't work as well as it had for the opposition because we also took off the accuracy - where their slower bowlers had propspered by bowling full and straight, our deliveries were more of the short and wide variety. That meant plenty of work for the fielders, with Marcelino Gopal and Arnie Garside both superb on the one and Richard Rex running tirelessly (and rapidly) around the boundaries. Still, we did finally generate some openings, and in what was probably the critical over of the innings Faruk Kara (0/23) generated three chances: an edge flew past 'keeper Cam Petrie standing up; a hard-hit pull went straight to Amit on the square leg boundary, only to burst through his hands and smack him in the sternum, winding him; and then a Faruk got his hand to a low drive, which then smacked him on the leg, instantly inducing a massive cartoon-style lump just below his similarly-shaped knee. So we could have had both Fulbourn openers back in the pavilion, but instead that's where Faruk ended up for the rest of the afternoon. Down to ten men we were pretty clearly done, and while a last-minute LBW looked pretty adjacent (certainly moreso than some of the four we gave earlier in the day) and would have given us one more bowling point, there's no denying that Fulbourn's win was every bit as comfortable as England's had been earlier in the day.
Football might well be coming home to England, but cricket does not seem likely to be heading back to Romseey any time soon.