Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Junior league cricket used to be a simple game: turn up and try and win while having a bit of fun. Even if it's been rare for us to do both, we've at least managed the latter most seasons. But the spectre of the "you only live twice" ending to our game against Thriplow in June, combined with some extraordinarily unpleasant matches since, loomed ominously over today's game. We'd already tried the simple suggestion of just going out and having fun in our most recent match two weeks ago, but given that didn't work there didn't seem to be any place to go today. What could we reasonably hope to get out of the game?
At first it seemed runs, as it was another warm day on this hottest of summers, and it would surely be more enjoyable to bat first and rack up a big total. But then one look at the pitch - green in the middle with soft caked mud at either end - made it immediately clear that both sides would be keen to bowl. Certainly that's what we would have done if we'd won the toss . . . and so of course we found ourselves batting first after all.
Kshitij Sabnis (8 off 20 balls) and Richard Rex (8 off 16 balls) were pretty solid to begin with, doing well to keep down some thunderballs that leapt up at them, only to both perish to fast, full deliveries in which the pitch played no part. 18/2 was not where we wanted to be after 6 overs, but our 3rd wicket pair of Ferdi Rex and Martin Prowse were then rock-solid, a state soon achieved by the now-dry pitch as well. Ferdi and Martin were still together after 22 overs, even if our rather low total of 79 runs suggested the cricket was rather attritional. We were clearly still in danger of posting a moderate total . . .
. . . to say nothing of sending the spectators to sleep. Indeed, this part of the game was defined by the efforts the rest of us took to find off-field distractions. The nadir came when Andy produced his copy of the CCA Handbook for Daniel and Richard to examine, apparently on a "for your eyes only" basis - Ev, it seemed, did not have the necessary clearance. Sadly, it's pretty dismal reading, distinguished only by the appearance of random apostrophe's, and it was soon returned whence it came. A far better distraction was the arrival of Malcolm's dog Boston, who immediately became the centre of attention until his enforced departure at the tea break.
Fortunately, the cricket itself had long since become the centre of attention, thanks primarily to Ferdi Rex, who seemed to have a goldeneye to the point that he was hitting fours and sixes basically at will. He raced past fifty and then rapidly onto his century, and was all set to break Nick Clarke's club record score of 133* . . . but that will have to die another day, because Ferdi made the mistake of going into "smash everything" mode and so was caught on the boundary for a superb 129 off 96 balls (with 17 fours and 6 sixes). Martin then took on the responsibility for keeping the scoring going, making it to a half-century of his own before also falling to a good boundary line catch (for 56 off 86 balls). Olly Rex (20* off 13 balls) and Stephan van Eeden (18* off 9 balls) were then freed up to take things up to a Spinal Tap-esque eleven, and we finished with a surely winning total of 251/4.
With the pitch now playing pretty true it was no real surprise that we struggled to make any early breakthroughs: the Thriplow openers were still together in the 16th over - although the fact that we'd allowed them just 53 runs to this point meant that the required rate was already above 8 an over, so we weren't too unhappy. We were soon much happier, however, when one of the batsman was lured into overbalancing by an in-swinger from Huw Davies (1/26 off 5 overs) and 'keeper Ev Fox whipped off the bails with the batsman apparently just out of his ground . . . and then the umpire, despite having the easy out of being "not sure", decided that while the call was close he was sure the batsman hadn't made it back and so gave him out. This is, of course, as things should be, but such was our experience so far this season that it seemed like a minor miracle. Catherine Owen (1/35 off 7 overs) made another breakthrough, but the surviving Thriplow opener had started to accelerate, and their total of 115/2 after 26 overs compared favourably with ours at the same point (103 for the same number of wickets).
Fortunately for us, the last third of both innings couldn't have been much more different: we scored 136/2 in our last 14 overs; theirs yielded just 51/5, with wickets going to Daniel Mortlock (1/13 off 8 overs), Ferdi Rex (1/36 off 8 overs), and Faruk Kara (1/25 off 5 overs). Stephan van Eeden (0/19 off 6 overs) was brought on with a license to kill, the idea being that he'd quickly finish off the tail; but he was unable to get through the defenses two young left-handers, one of whom was the "star" of our previous match against Thriplow. What we really needed was one of Aditya Vaidyanathan's second spells - he's taken 2/13, 5/0 and 1/0 when coming back later in the innings this season - but sadly he was otherwise occupied today.
Part of the problem was that we weren't taking our catches: a post-match tally revealed a total of nine drops, albeit largely at the more difficult end of the spectrum. In this context the one catch we did take, when Daniel called decisively for a moonraker of a shot that could have been reached by at least two other fielders, is at least worth a mention; although it really was the Ev Fox show, as he finished up completing a total of 3 stumpings (equalling his club record). Still, the ground fielding was largely excellent (with the exception of a sort of Bermuda triangle effect near the pavilion in which our fielders seemed convinced they were only allowed to use their feet to stop the ball), and given that the bowlers' dismissals listed above don't tally to the 7 Thriplow wickets that fell, the more numerically-inclined of you might at this stage be assuming that we made up for this with a couple of run outs. But the even-more astute reader would have noticed that there's also an over missing from the bowlers' counts - that would be the final over of the game, which is where we pick up the action:
Captain Mortlock appears to have lost the plot a little in these dying moments of the game. Having attempted to bowl an illegal ninth over a few minutes ago, earning the response "Doctor: no" from the scorers, he now takes off van Eeden, who'd been bowling well, and brings on Richard Rex for this first over of the day. With Thriplow now past the 160 they needed for a fourth batting point, there's nothing really riding on this, but a few of the fielders are exchanging the sort of looks that Gary Lineker so famously offered up when Paul Gascoigne lost it at Italia 90. And Richard himself was sufficiently surprised by the news that he promptly dropped the simplest of chances off the penultimate delivery of the previous over.
Even with our resounding victory today we're still stuck in the relegation zone, 17 points behind Thriplow; but there is a quantum of solace to be had from the fact that we managed to turn up and win while having a bit of fun.