Weekend Woes

Woeful game at the weekend :( We were all there at 1.15 for a 1.30 start ... but there was no sign of the opposition. Cue a bloody HOUR of sitting around waiting! Eventually they turned up after 2.30, and they didn't seem too apologetic. They sort of moped around until we herded them into the changing rooms - and even once we got them on the field they were in no hurry to make up for the fact that they were an hour late.

It wouldn't bother me so much if they were a team from down the country that had to travel to get there. Even in that scenario, if they were late they'd probably ring ahead. But these lads are from a club that's less than 30 minutes away - and they never contacted us once to let us know what was going on!!!

I don't think I'd ever been so fired up for a game - but alas revenge was not to be ours! They had two very good bowlers, who were firing it in quick and straight and picked up 7 wickets clean bowled between them. The rest of the team were pretty much rubbish from a bowling point of view - and were our only source of runs. Having said that, there weren't many of said runs - with our side only able to put together 65 :o And for me? You guessed it - a duck (one of 4 from our side)

So as you can imagine - defending that total was never going to be easy. I think the fact that we were all gunning for them for holding us up was our downfall in the batting - where clearer heads would have been better. But in the field, a bit of adreneline can only be an advantage, and to be fair we didn't do too badly. It took them 24 overs to get the 66 runs, and we didn't give them any easy runs through misfields or lazy chasing. On the flip side, they were under no pressure and didn't need to take risky runs - usually taking singles off balls that could have gone for two. Again, they only had two batsmen that looked really good - with one of their openers playing through the innings. It's not often at Junior C level that you see a player that can split the field as easily as he could. Normally, a lad might have two shots that he can place, and anything else he uses could send the ball anywhere in a 60 degree arc.

Our bowling wasn't as good as it could have been either - with only one of us firing (he picked up 3 of the 4 wickets). There was too much going down leg on a day that we could ill-afford byes. My own bowling was a bit mixed. I hadn't bowled in a game for the 3 weeks previous, so I'd kinda forgotten what was working for me. My first over was waaaay too expensive - I was being overly cautious and putting it down too slowly. The line was good, but the length was a little too full and their opener was driving it well (again which you don't normally get - usually batsmen are leg-side sloggers).

Second over was much better, with a couple of chances coming off it (an inside edge, one that seamed in and was just blocked and two that went in the air but dropped just short of fielders). But two was all I had time for, with the game finishing a couple of balls later. On the plus side, I did take a catch - which as someone pointed out puts my catch tally at exactly twice my run tally for the season. That has to be some kind of record?

It turns out though that we were well within our rights to claim a walkover after half an hour of the start - if we'd decided to. Obviously there was no way we were going to do that, we all wanted to get a game in - but looking back on how it went ........

Nearly forgot!!! On Friday evening I'd a game of taverners cricket where I made 11 runs and took two wickets. We still lost, but it's the first time I've made double figures in any form of cricket :D