I've always wanted to play indoor cricket, but it's always seemed shrouded in secrecy and open to a selected few. You never heard anything about it other than one or two of the 'Insiders' within the club mentioning it among each other and that was it. This year with the exponential growth of the club and the massive influx of people from different ethnic backgrounds, it feels like we've lost a lot of the people that were holding the club back... the 'Inner circle' maybe have left or have stepped back? Whatever has happened it's meant that Indoor cricket was offered to everyone and I jumped at it and so too did 29 other people. Tonight was the first game...
What happened? The game was played at the Riverside leisure centre in Chelmsford...
The team consisted of...
'Harry' Hiralkumar Suthar
Me Dave Thompson
Arvind Rajaram
Front Row left to right...
Keigan Scannell
Lennon Cleveley (Capt/Keeper)
Daniel Gray
To be honest as this was our first game I didn't have a clue what was going, no idea of how many overs we bowled or what constituted a game - seemed like possibly 10 overs. I think I bowled 3 and so did someone else (Arvind)? The other 2 bowlers bowled 2 it seemed?
The scoring was different. What I did note that was a normal run was worth 2 runs and most of the runs seemed to be gained by hitting the ball to the wall and running a single. Hitting the wall gained you a point and the run between the stumps 2, so that scored you 3 and seemed like the 'Go to' approach?
Balls hitting the end walls in the air I think are sixes, not sure about the side walls. I'll pick up the rules as we go along I guess?
Umpires were provided as too was a scorer which was a result as you have to score using a machine that looks like something from the Apollo space missions in the 1960's and 70's.
When we turned up, the game that preceded ours was coming to an end someone noted that the scores were in the 90's at the end of the game. The opposition were in the changing room when I was getting ready and I spoke to a bloke about it and he said they'd been playing some years and their first 2 years they came bottom of the league 2 years in succession, saying that it takes a while to figure the correct approach to playing it.
How do you feel it went? Given how the game panned out and the fact that I've not picked up a ball in a month or so it went well. Read on below...
What was good/bad? It was cricket so everything about it was good, met a bloke I've played against before "Ken", can't remember who he plays for and I didn't even get the name of this team he was playing for here! Nothing bad really - maybe it would have been a good idea to get more of a sense of how the scoring worked out because it was nothing like anything I'd seen before! The light in the hall might be better and others commented that it's difficult to see the ball coming off the green carpet. The ball is a dull red low bounce rubber, pretty much responds in a similar way to a proper ball. I copped one in the face off a slow bowler - didn't hurt, there's enough weight in the ball to warrant the use of a box though.
Analysis. Apparently, the scores will appear somewhere on-line and I'll copy them over. Not used to the fact that the scoring rate is mental, it felt like the first few overs were poor. Wides are tight, anything down the leg-side was given as a wide. So the run rate was in excess of 10 and over and it felt like the game was going away from us from the outset. I think I came on for the fourth over having seen Dan, Arvind and Harry bowl and get clobbered, I got a wicket with the first ball with Harry or Arvind taking an easy catch at Mid off. I think I bowled another over straight after and then the next over I got another wicket bowling the bloke around the legs with a Leg-break. I think we got another 2 wickets, but anyone scoring over 25 I think gets retired and they had 2 x retirees and they came back on and the oppo finished on 140 which looked way beyond what we'd potentially get against an experienced side.
14/10/24. Got access to the score sheets...
So, looking at this it looks like there's 12 overs per innings. No idea what the rules are - could you use 3 bowlers and they bowl 4 overs each or two - 6 overs each? Will have to either read the rules or see how it pans out each game. So looking at the score sheet for the bowling looks like I did OK, especially as I took 2 of the wickets and wasn't particularly costly in comparison to the others.
Just been looking around the website and found more data...
Even though we lost, we've got some points and 4 teams have played we're not at the bottom of the table and having spoken to the bloke in the changing room I reckon that should be our first objective.
This is a nice start, just need to keep doing it. It would be good to find out what this other bloke does. I reckon a good ball to be able to bowl would be the top-spinner and a small leg-break with a lot more over-spin. I wonder how it's going to pan out in terms of Lennon picking the team? Will the team rotate. I reckon we could have easily fielded 2 x teams given that there's 30 people with their names down to play?
Good to see all our batters in the top 10 with Keagan at the top. Now it's a case of how do I stay in the team? Because I'm pretty useless at batting and the fact that I don't really have an ego re batting, I was aware that there were proper batters in the wings waiting to bat again, so I was happy to lose my wicket and give them a 2nd chance. What I did do batting with Lennon was run x 2 which was the only example of it in either innings. Risky, but when the pressure is on, the fielders are struggling to get the ball back clean.
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