Venturers Vs Tichborne, Sunday April 26th

Venturers 176/8 (35), Tichborne 180/6 (32.5)

Play-Cricket Results

Tichborne is a village a few miles from Winchester. Their team went by some name, the Badgers or the Raincoats or something else not obviously relevant. At some point, possibly in the nineteenth century, the club probably took a decision that whatever else happened they would not be known as the Tichborne Claimants.

They were the real thing, anyway. A village side on a tour: collectively rather hung over, determined to have fun, attempting to win but not obsessed by it, not all that bad at cricket really. Pretty similar to us, except that we don’t do collective hangovers (individual hangovers are a matter for the player concerned) and we sometimes are all that bad at cricket. Today we weren’t, although there was some rustiness. Jaideep and Mizan started briskly but soon slowed against accurate bowling and tight fielding. The more hungover bowler eventually bowled Mizan through a vague waft, and the first change bowler at the other end pinned Jaideep, who had no quarrel with Bruce’s LBW decision. Josh soon skied to mid-off. A spinner was put on at the other end, addressed as “Quantum” by his teammates. He bowled accurately, with a well-disguised fermion, and might have been successful with an LBW appeal against Farooq. Gregory, applying the Copenhagen interpretation, decided that there was a sufficient probability that it would have missed leg, and possibly a feather of bat, and gave it not out. There was no annoyance. Anyway it made little difference. Farooq made another dozen or so and then miscued at the other end, Kedar was bowled by the spinner and it was left to Joji and Naveen to drag the score towards something respectable. Imran and Ajeet gave Naveen useful support after Joji was out, and even after Naveen was out to the first ball of the last over, Bruce added a useful handful.

Tichborne’s reply began in a similar way to ours. Ajeet and Imran were accurate and the openers were content to see them off, but after that one of them played a tentative prod at Joji and missed. The other lost patience and sliced Gregory’s fourth ball to point, where Mizan held the easy catch. But now we lost our way. We were bowling to their wicketkeeper, a good batsman, and to his sound but unthreatening partner. The plan was to keep the wicketkeeper off strike and make him chase runs, but we kept misfielding and allowing even numbers, or bowling him hittable balls. Imran rotated his bowlers quickly, so as to stop the batsmen getting used to anything, but the overall effect was quite defensive. Everybody bowled one tidy over and then got hit, and we were a bit slow to work out what fields to set. Eventually Imran got one to bounce a bit: the edge hit Josh on the forearm but he embraced the rebound. At that point we were probably slight favourites, but we were still unfocussed. Imran eventually picked off the new batsman, Ajeet found a way through the other’s defence and repeated the trick next ball. But we weren’t through the batting: the bowlers who had started the slide in our innings by removing Mizan and Jaideep returned with pads on, stopped their slide, and calmly accumulated the necessary runs.