Venturers vs Canal Taverners, Wednesday June 29th

Canal Taverners 121-7 Venturers 86-8

Simon won the toss and invited Canal Taverners to bat, in the hope that some of them would get legless before fielding, but it didn't work. Nigel, really quite quick down the hill (we were on the farthest pitch at Sulis) and Kevin, accurate up it, caused their dangerous openers considerable trouble and removed one each. Nigel was quick at times, and when he got the ball on the right length was decidedly dangerous; but he did drop a little short occasionally, and on uncovered West of England pitches the ball just sits up if you do that, unless you are very fast. Kevin got hoicked to the short leg side boundary a couple of times before the batsman missed and was bowled.

The number 3 is a left-hander who has also caused us much trouble in the past. Gregory kept him quiet, but bowled assorted rubbish to his right-handed partner: Matt was better overall, but inconsistent. The left-hander was also let off a couple of times. He pushed Matt towards Kevin at deep mid-on and set off, forgetting the the bowler is allowed to field the ball himself; but Matt, with no clear view of what was happening, selected (b). Then he top-edged a simple catch to square leg, who dropped it despite being Alex W. But a couple of balls later Gregory got his statutory left-hander when he chased a wide one and gave Kevin an even easier catch. Matt cleaned his partner up two balls later. At that point we were doing well in terms of wickets but we had given away slightly more runs than we really wanted to have done; but Gregory got his length back just in time, and Alex and Rob finished things off with four excellent final overs containing only two bad balls. Both of these were full tosses from Alex, and both resulted in return catches; for good measure he got a third wicket with one of his good ones.

To get the 122 we needed we had to have either very steady progress in ones and twos or a few good overs. Canal Taverners had three or four batsman capable of taking ten or a dozen off an over, and had done so three or four times; we really had only Nigel. He and Matt tried the singles approach instead, which worked up to a point, but the bowling was a little too accurate. They needed to supplement their running by occasional boundaries. Instead they took us to 53 for none in the fourteenth over, with only one boundary. It was better than 70 for 4 would have been but it left too much to do, given the nature of the batting to come. They were helped by the inability of some of the fieldsmen to see the ball; but really they batted slightly too sensibly, which isn't our usual problem. Eventually they both miscued towards mid-on and Alex C, obliged to get on with it at once which isn't really his style, lost his off stump. Add in a few absurd attempts to batter some absurd slow bowling and we had suddenly lost six wickets for six runs, and were sunk. Kevin restored some respect with a few shots, including the only six of the match (surprising considering the short boundary) but the rest of the scoring was binary: only Kevin, Nigel and Matt made as many as 2.

Fixtures & Results 2009