Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Such was was the demoralised state of Romsey Town CC that, upon winning the toss today in what seemed sure to be glorious batting conditions, it was universally (if reluctantly) accepted that we had to bowl first lest our out-of-form and out-of-practice top order crumble. Heading out to bowl, it was hard to avoid the fatalistic fear that the Mill Green batsmen would see off the new ball and then cash in. That certainly seemed pretty likely in the first few overs as their openers defended solidly while dispatching the few bad balls decisively. But then suddenly things started going our way: one ball reared off both a length and the batsman's gloves and obligingly popped into Richard Rex's hands at slip; another batsman played what seemed a perfectly reasonable defensive shot that scooted a few inches above the grass and was held even fewer inches above the grass by Cam Petrie at short-cover; and then an (admittedly plumb) LBW was unhesitatingly given, making for a rather stark contrast with our previous match. The beneificiary in all three cases was Daniel Mortlock (3/15), who was perhaps reaping the reward for club loyalty, having today joined Andy Owen and Rog Shelley, both watching, as the only (known) members of the Romsey 200-games club. More importantly, Mill Green seemed to be in heaps of trouble at 18/3 after 7 overs . . .
. . . although they weren't in quite so much trouble at 154/5 after 32 overs. Even though we'd gone close to some breakthroughs - a number of near-catches had brushed desperate fingertips - Mill Green's middle order had owned the middle part of the innings, continuing their openers' policy of block-block-block-punish. This philosophy was best illustrated by their number six, who'd managed just 2 scoring shots from his first 32 balls. Having just struggled to play out a maiden from Huw Davies (a respectable 0/29 from his first 7 overs), it seeemed reasonable to think that Huw would retain the upper hand in his final over . . . but instead the batsman smashed four consecutive boundaries that made a mockery of our aggressive field placements. Huw thus finished with much less pleasing figures of 0/46, and, with Catherine Owen (1/45) having her previously decent figures similiarly spoiled by one bad over, it was hard not to see a 200+ target in our future.But that would be to reckon without taking into account the fact that we still had four overs left from Adi Vaidyanathan. While his first spell of 0/13 was a bit mixed, the word on the street was that he always came back better in his second spell. That, it would seem, is an understatement. His second spell today consisted of 11 deliveries, 6 of which were dots and the rest of which were wickets, the last three of which constituted just the fourth league hat-trick for the club. Add in a wicket to Faruk Kara (1/15) in the intervening over and we'd truly entered some sort of weird fantasy world in which we could do no wrong. In the course of 17 decidedly eventful deliveries, Mill Green lost their last 6 wickets for a solitary run, a collapse worse than any Romsey Collapse (TM) on record. 155 was still a competitive total, but the psychological impact surely meant the win was ours for the taking.
And even when we finished the first over of our innings on 1/1, there was still a sense that simply batting sensibly would be enough. And so it turned out, as over the next hour Cam Petrie (72 off 68 balls) and Richard Rex (41 off 70 balls) put together easily our best partnership of the season. Indeed, their 107-run union was as much as the whole team managed in two earlier fixtures. Richard did a good job of turning over the strike, but it really was the Cam show, as he timed boundaries all around the ground and generally gave the sense that he would be on for a century but for the small target. In the end that didn't come up as his innings was cut off by a rather dubious LBW decision - the fact that it was actually a rare TBW (tummy before wicket) says it all - but it was still very much "job done" with only 16 more needed at this stage.
Of course that immediately meant we went into "panic mode", which the Mill Green fielders immediately picked up on, and they were very much in the ascendancy from then on - there'd already been one collapse of 6/1 today, so another surely couldn't be ruled out? Our mindset was once again revealed when Olly Rex (9* off 8 balls) hit a late-cut (or was it an edge?) into the vacant third-man region and, despite just needing 3 more runs, we found ourselves baying madly for non-striker Jeff Beaumont (16* off 18 balls) to haul himself over the line for the winning run, despite the fact that we had 6 wickets and 62 balls to spare.
It was nice to win so comfortably, but after five consecutive losses we would have taken any sort of victory. One of the Mill Green players commented to his teammate that he "can't believe these guys are bottom of the league", which rather implies something was different today. The question is: what? Other than the obvious (bowling spells of 5/13 and 3/15; innings of 72 and 41), there were plenty of other self-nominations: Nathan Wright decided it was the quality of his twelfth-manning; Daniel asserted it was superior leadership; Daniel's partner Hiranya suggested it might be her presence as supporter; and so on. But of course this is all nonsense: cricket's a team game, and it takes a good team to win, and today that's what we were.