As it's the middle of the summer holiday here in the UK as with most clubs - getting your lowest team out becomes almost impossible and we had to scrap the 6th XI game and the majority of us got moved up to the 5th XI and so on throughout all the teams. Ry a 6th XI player got a chance in the 1st XI because of his ground fielding - he's one of the best. He's a rugby player, so plays hard and fast and doesn't care about diving and the consequences, he just gives total 100% full committment, he's not a IT/Office worker, so he's got glutes and a strong core - so is an actual athlete. The majority of us ended up in the 5th. For Basav, the captain in the days preceding the match it sounded a bit of a nightmare with the game potentially being short of players and all sorts of shenanigans with regards the selection process of the players.
So Friday night I helped him out and went and collected the keys and balls from the club, so he didn't have to worry about that on Saturday. I assumed, as did some of the others we'd be on pitch 2, which is where the 5th usually play.
So once there, I could see that game was underway and Brian Waterman was over at pitch 3. I had the keys so assumed that we had access to the showers, toilets and changing rooms. I opened them up and then some youth came over saying his captain had issues with me opening the change rooms. So there was a bit of a discussion about that. I left it at 'I just assumed as we had the keys we shared access to the toilets and showers'. Then locked up and went over to pitch 3. Whether that added to Basav's woes or not, I don't know. Tony Keep took it upon himself to choose the strip we were to play on and put in the stump - fixing them way too wide. It was also the wrong strip.
We won the toss, all the team showed up and we were to bat first. The opposition were mostly small boys with 3 older blokes and some youths including the Wrist Spinner 'Kat' who I've played against before. Looking at our team in comparison you'd have said we were the potential favourites, so I wasn't that fussed on batting first, but a part of me always wants to bowl first in case we have a batting collapse. This didn't look likely by my estimation, but how wrong I was!
They opened with a bloke who was probably in his 40's and a younger player. His first over was a little wayward with some wides, but it was evident he had some pace, and then he tided up his bowling and bowled a spell that basically blasted us out of the game supported by some good bowling at the other end from the youth player.
It was only Brian who negotiated the strike avoiding S.McDonagh as much as he could that went to high score at a decent strike-rate with 31 before being caught by S.McDonagh off Barkers bowling. The only other player to get a decent score was our young player Shriv who played with a much better attitude in this game and basically gave us a shot at a game.
I batted No.11 with Tony Keep and got a not out for 0, we finished with 117. With three adults in the game and a few in their later teens and early 20's this looked like a tall order.
A couple of confident looking younger players came out first, but Deepak saw off a couple of them with some good accurate bowling. Tony Keep bowled tightly with no wickets from the Estate end, but was leaking a few 4's here and there. Unusual for Tony not to take wickets, but it was a pressure game with little runs to play with. It looked worse then when out marched S.McDonagh at No.3 - I'm thinking - 'Is he now going bat like he opened the bowling'? Fortunately he didn't. Deepak getting rid of him for 8 runs. That brought Elliott Davies and Oliver Milchard (I think) to the crease with more discussion in the middle between them and a sense of determination. Davies was looking to access runs through the legside as much as possible. Between them they stabilised the innings and took a degree of control and steadied the game...
We were starting to leak runs and at the end of the 18th over they were on 77 with only 40 runs required off of the remaining 22 overs, it was looking like a lost cause, but to make it worse we were dropping catches left-right and centre and fielding like a bunch of 12 year olds playing with a hard ball for the first time. People were getting frustrated and we had somehow gained at least 1 extra captain at this point over-riding Basav's captaincy it was a shambles. The game was getting away from us and they still had 6 wickets in-hand including the captain.
Basav brought himself on - under pressure, he'd already copped a ball in the face fielding and split his lip and now bowled poorly giving away more runs, bowling full beamers being pulled for 4 down to fine-leg. Then he bowled a 3rd full beamer and hit the batter 'Ollie' on the head (With helmet) and he went down like a sack of bricks. Early drinks break was called and after that Shriv was brought into the attack (Another fast bowler) and although he bowled well, he was let down in the field by really poor fielding and was expensive. By now, the ball was in a state where I could bowl and Basav bought me on, to be fair I didn't think I'd even get a bowl. It turned out to be a decent plan.
Basav got Davies (Bowled) and I got Milchard off of an unusual bowled and caught, the ball was hit directly back at me low and hard and I realised if it went past me it was going to be a 4, so I stuck the side of my boot out angled upwards, so that the hard sole would take some of the impact and the ball deflected off the boot vertically up into the air about 12' and I took a catch - Caught and bowled! I did it really 'Cool and calmly' and everyone was like - "Whoa look what the old geezer did". Others were saying 'I've never seen anything like that in all my cricket days'.
My foot was a little bruised by the end of the day!
That wasn't the last of the decent wickets though. A younger kid came out and showed no respect and hit me for 3 as I recall into a pocket with no fielder (May have been mis-fielded) and it may have been a cover-drive. So not having bowled Flippers this year, thought that the kid would have never seen a Flipper and would be expecting another leg-break and bowled him middle stump - almost knocked out of the ground!
Then the captain came out. I bowled at him outside of the off-stump and he wafted several play and misses, but I was looking to bowl very wide looking for catches from the keeper or Brian in slips. One went to Brian off the top edge but Brian dropped it. Brian's 75 and had a broken collar bone, so that's fair enough. The captain when I did get the line slightly wrong was hitting me down to Basav at fine-leg. Basav did a good job down there, pretty much stopping everything. So, I thought, this bloke can't hit the ball through the off-side, so he might fancy his chances on the leg-side, so if I fill up the leg-side and bowl around the wicket, there's a chance I might get him caught leg-side, or seeing that the off-side is now virtually empty, he might try some crazy shot and get caught behind or just miss and be bowled or stumped? I never bowl around the stumps to right-handers, so this was a radical move for me, but I felt it was called for. It worked, I bowled a couple where he played and missed and the 3rd ball went past the edge of the bat and went through his legs and hit the off-stump, he was fuming.
The fourth wicket was more straight-forward a dipping leg-break that the kid tried to put out of the park and mis-hit caught at covers by Shriv. At this point they were on 106 only needing another 12 to win. I had one over and 4 balls left with their leg-spinner Katherine Mayfield and the small kid Rixon. I probably over-thought it, Mayfield hit 2 off me and so too did Rixon and then bowled a wide in the last over. Waleed "bowling" from the Estate end was hit for 4 and that was the game. We were beaten by just 2 runs.
Overall, given the fact that it was such an eventful game and the fact that they out-bowled us and left us in a difficult situation, the fact that it came down to the last little kid who brought the game home for them with a 2 and a 4, which were both good shots, it was a great game. I'd much rather be in games like that than ones where we bat, score 280 and bowl out the opposition for 100 or something.
Take-aways... I don't think I could be a captain. I kind of fancied the idea, but seeing the appalling fielding executed by adults - people that are 30 years or younger than me that can barely run and bend down, that have no technique, agility or committment, I don't think I'd be able to keep my cool. So the idea of being the 6th XI captain next year for the moment post this game is on the shelf. I know also that Basav has had a nightmare of a week and I reckon that given all the crap you have to deal with I don't know if I could show up at the game and play as well as I could if I wasn't the captain. I know back in the 4th XI days, I hardly bowled at all and that was when you could bowl 14 plus overs if you wanted to. So for the moment that idea is shelved.
In this match this is where I was hit. At one point when I did set my field, there was virtually no-one on the leg-side. Basav did put someone in at square leg, but they didn't get near a ball. Every leg-side ball was swept to fine leg and all but one was stopped by Basav.
All of the balls that went through the Gully/third man region where mis-fielded.
I've blocked out of my mind how many catches were put down off of my bowling. But if we'd have taken our catches we'd have easily won, but that's always the case, but this was an atrocious display of fielding and catching and it cost us the game.
Bowling around the wicket.
See the next blog post.
Among the Non Pro spin-bowlers, this is where this left me this week...
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