9th May 2nd game 2022

 2nd game of the season. initially selected to play in the 4's and then at the last minute as I'm about to pack my bag I get a call and I'm asked to play in the 5's. To be honest the 5's were playing at Wickford memorial park and I quite fancied playing there as I've not been there for years and the last we put out a team with 8 players, six of them small boys and it was awful.

This week looked better, it looked as though we were going to play with a full team. There was some faffing as it's not obvious which pitch is what, but the '3rd' pitch apparently is the one in front of the no longer used for cricket pavilion/changing rooms.

The weather was glorious and the wicket looked pretty good. The outfield though was full of cut grass and the surrounding vegetation beyond the boundary looked thick and unkempt. The opposition began to turn up along with our team. The make up of our team...

I've bunged in an approximation of our teams ages. This 5th XI changes from week to week and there's only a core group of players... Farhan, Aariz (Farhan's son), Martin and Kiegan Scannell (Father and son). The rest of us play sporadically - some because they play in the 4's others because of work commitments. Hassan has only ever played 3 times before because of work and his previous scores were 0 - 4 - 7 or something very similar. Muhammed, Sri, Fawad, Umer and me are bowlers as far as I can make out and the only recognised batters as such are Farhan and Martin. Reece has been noted to give the ball a bit of a biff. 

The opposition were proportionately much older with a kid who'd never played adult cricket before but stepped up as they were a player short and few 20 year olds.

We won the toss and opted to bat. Their openers bowled quite well, but were supported in the field particularly well, but the grass helped them out. We got off to a reasonable start and then lost 2 and Reece joined the captain and started to accumulate rans at a reasonable rate. We were going well and then we lost Farhan our best bat. Then Hassan walked in off the back of 0-4 and 7 in the past three games and all hell was unleashed on the Galleywood lads. See below...

Hasson almost dealt in only 4's and 6's and as their bowlers became more and more demoralised Reece grew in confidence and batted his way through to 103 before being run out. Hassan was bowled eventually and we finished on ***

As the Galleywood lads came off the captain said that the game would be over quite quick as they didn't have any batting.

The first couple of blokes went cheaply as one of our bowlers - Fawad Butt looked pretty handy - fast and accurate. Their skipper had to go off, injured having pulled up for some reason and he said he couldn't see himself coming back on again. Then the small boy came out and and his Dad came out with him to umpire and asked if we could take it easy with him as the game was already ours by a long long way and we said we would. Having not batted, I wanted to bowl, so Farhan took off of Fawad and put me on at the "River end". 

This did mean if they had any right-handed sloggers I'd be ending up in the bushes and trees, I was hoping to bowl from the Road end with the advantage of a bigger boundary and put a my new fielding theory into action. I was just desperate to have a bowl so was happy to have the River End. In the meantime the small boy was caught off the first ball and I'd pointed out that "You can't get out on the first ball" everyone chuckled and the kid got another go. Someone else caught him and dropped the ball. My first ball was to the kid  - I bowled him and I'd already said if I bowl him just call a no-ball. These shenanigans went on for a few overs while we worked on the blokes at the other end. 

Two of them took me to task...

J. Brown came out and went for it. I wasn't bowling well at all, I was trying to get the ball to turn from leg, but just wasn't getting any revs on the ball. I tried a flipper and that was a little short and that went the distance, so then started to bowl with more over-spin (Top-Spin). In between overs walking past this bloke he commented "You're tricky bowler - one ball's on the floor (That'll be the flipper) and then the next is up around my neck"! (That'll be the top-spinner). The next over I bowled a couple of the non-spinning leggies and then a faster top-spinner which rushed on and took him by surprise hitting the top of the bat and he poked it back to me for a bowled and caught.

This Bloke (below) I didn't get him, but he was run out and that was the end of the game, but he wasn't a bad player.

The bowling figures...

6-0-40-3 Given the circumstance I'll take that.

First game 2022

I was hoping to play in the 4th XI in a league game, but instead ended up in the 5th XI in a friendly against Westcliff over at Belfairs park on the 'North Pitch'.

Originally it was due to be against someone else at Chelmsford, but they got something wrong and the fixture was called off. Westcliff had the same kind of mishap and in a matter of half a day it seems the match up between us and them was organised and it was game on.

Unfortunately, not everyone on our side got the memo, so on Sat morning some people headed off to Chelmsford!

I've not had the best of build-ups to the start of the season this year as I went down with Covid having already been ill prior to that and since Covid I've never felt 100% (2 weeks ago). So I wasn't sure how I'd go. Looking at the app on my phone I've been averaging 7,330 steps per day and the equivalent of 17 flights of stairs a day per week, so I was probably going to be okay. 

There was some confusion with regards what the start time was and I was under the impression it was a 12.30 start for a short Mickey Mouse 40 over game. Remember girls and boys play 60 over games in Australia over two days at the weekend - can you image that here in the UK? Maybe, Ben Stokes as the new England captain in charge of reinvigorating the test team should have a look at the obsession in this country for playing increasingly shorter formats of cricket? So 40 overs it was - or so I thought. 

The team the night before looked like this...

At 12.15 with the time of the match being confirmed as 12.30 we consisted of Matt Knight, Kiegan Scannell, Martin Scannell (c) and a new bloke Ather. No sign of the others - 6 of us to start the game. Martin was the captain, but had agreed that he would be happy if there was input from others as he'd never done it before. He went out to the middle and did the toss and lost. But on the walk out their captain suggested that rather than play a 40 overs... "Why don't we ease into the season with a 35 overs game and not over do it" or something! Oh my God, I've paid £10 to play a miserly 40 overs and then they go and reduce it to 35. Jeez - if you don't like cricket and don't want to play it - choose to play football - 90 mins job done. Baffled. I surf, when I get to the beach I don't go down get in the water and back out again half hour later. I like surfing - once I'm in it's a 4 or 5 hour session, then a break and back in again for another 3-5 hours and then in the evening another couple of hours. The point is... I like surfing therefore I want to do it for as many hours as possible. Anyway...

12.30 came and we fielded first and they gave us some blokes. Somehow, Tristan another new bloke snuck on the field and I didn't even realise, But we had 11 in the field at the start and their blokes fielded okay. Looking at our team we had Ather who was in his late 20's maybe early 30's and Matt Knight who usually wicket keeps and bats but in response to the question can you bowl said "Yeah I can bowl a bit". I'd seen him in the nets recently and he'd looked okay, so he bowled from A127 end and Ather who had said that he was an all-rounder opened from the "Seaside end".

Matt Knight did well - 7.2/0/21/2 pretty good for a wicket keeper. Ather 5/0/24/0 not bad given this was the first time he'd played in 9 years. From my position, fielding at Mid-On I noted the ball clatter into the batters pads on a number of times and no-one went up for it least of all Ather and the wicket keeper, so I assumed that the ball must have been going down leg or something? Later in the break between innings I spoke to Ather and asked if any of the balls that hit the batters pads looked like they may have been LBW's and he said. "Ah yeah that's the thing, I noticed that when you bowled you got an LBW, I'd spoken to someone before the match and they said at this level people don't give LBW's... Yeah I would have had three or four wickets... I didn't know, I'll do it next time".

The other new bloke - Tristan Holland - who hadn't played since he was 18 (over ten years ago) did really well despite slipping about all over the shop in the rain... 5/0/26/3. He just hit the stumps. Looking at the score sheet though, their scorer has made a bit of a dogs dinner of it and has all the names in the wrong boxes and I'm not really able to make any sense of it, which is a real shame because the bowlers wont be credited with their wickets. But having said that my score sheets not top-notch either.

Anyway I did eventually bring myself on to bowl. Recently I've been thinking that if I get to bowl I might go for a really different field setting and approach. I've generally perceived that batsmen at this level are stronger on their legside and look to slog sweep you for 4's and 6's through the area between deep mid-on and square leg. So I've always advocated an off-stump line.

This year during winter nets I experimented with bowling a leg-stump or outside leg-stump line which I never do. The theory being that if you set a field as the one below...

You're saying if you want the boundary you've either got to go aggressive and hit the ball for a six or through the field. Someone might say, they're just going tip and run and rotate the strike and you'll be going for 6 an over. But, the ball is turning into the stumps and if they get it wrong they're going to be bowled or possibly stumped. Another argument for this line is there's a blind spot in your eyes in the area where the ball nears the point where it bounces which works in your favour to a small extent. 

Warne used to say - "Tell me how you're going to take a wicket". In this case I feel that there's a number of ways... (1) Big sweep shot caught in the deep with the packed leg-side field. (2) Big sweep shot top-edged caught by 3, 11, 8 or 10. (3) Stumped (4) Bowled round the legs. (5) Bowled or LBW from my variation - faster flipper on the stumps. 

It works though, I bowled this line in the winter nets and caused all sorts of problems, bowled a few through the gate or round the legs, but the one that caught them out - especially better batsmen was the flipper. 

In this game being the captain, I started my spell with this field in mind, but had the problem of being a man short. I thought I'd start the spell and set a standard field (a) To see what the batters would do and (b) To see how well I was bowling and to see if I could get the ball turning off the wicket. I bowled 4 overs and I don't think it turned once significantly. I bowled an outside leg-stump line and only got called for a wide once. The image below is an approximation of where I was hit during the 4 overs. 

Looking at it, the positions I would have had the fielders in - again, approximated by the red dots looks as though it may have been effective. But given the fact that I didn't have 11 players I had the backward square leg player at backward point and the bloke at cow corner was in deep cover point and I went with that as it seemed quite effective and I went for 4/0/19/2 and would have gone for less if it wasn't for how unfit and unable to run some of the blokes in my team are - the ones between 20 and 30 years old!

I gave the kids a bowl Barath and JJ Bone and they were okay, Barath slightly better but he was sliding around all over the place with no spikes so I brought him off. I brought his Dad on who bowls really loopy and slow, but accurate left-arm orthodox. He also got two wickets.

Not that I've ever had the opportunity to put it into practice fully, but I'm also an advocate of short spells and after three overs from Sri where he'd gone for 19 I said to him, you have another over - if you get a wicket you stay on and sure enough it worked and he ended up with 5/0/28/2 which was happy about. Then he was instrumental in their last man getting out by orchestrating a run-out off his bowling. They finished with 153 a few runs short of their 35 overs.