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.