Venturers Vs Royal Oak, Wednesday June 18th

Royal Oak 108/7 (20), Venturers 111/4 (16.1)

Play-Cricket Results

Sulis has only an artificial pitch this year, so we decamped to Odd Down, where cyclists whizz round the track in the middle distance and a brass band was playing in the building. Imran started off with a maiden; Vijay also conceded nothing but Hemendra, keeping wicket, fumbled his last ball. The batsen set off and the nonstriker was nowhere close when Steve’s throw from short third man hit the stumps.

After a start like that we really needed to win. From a bowling point of view it was all quite smooth. We didn’t get any more wickets for quite a long time, and Gregory dropped short twice to the left-hander and paid twelve runs, but that was the only serious leakage. Ajeet was particularly good, with not much luck. Joji eventually bowled the left-hander. The right-hander hit a skier to Imran, who waited confidently for it and dropped it; then he hit another to Debashan, who circled nervously and caught it. Both batsmen would have been compulsorily retired shortly anyway, on reaching 40: Imran had negotiated this upwards from 25 at the start of the game. Thereafter, everybody who came in scratched around for a few and then got bowled, except for another direct hit in the field, this time from Tejas. We lost count of the overs briefly but recovered, and were left with 109 to get.

That should have been easy, and it was in the end. Hemendra and Tejas put up 30-odd for the first wicket fairly quickly, but then Hemendra and Vijay got bowled by consecutive harmless balls. Siddhant stuck around, nervously: there was some very jumpy running around this time. It was Tejas who dominated the scoring, so when he reached the retirement point there was some danger, but Joji took over smoothly. There was a final panic when Siddhant and Steve also got out to consecutive balls, but by then we only needed a dozen. Imran and Joji got them calmly enough, with four overs to spare.