Corsham Vs Venturers, Sunday May 24th

Venturers 199-10 (39.3), Corsham 131-10 (21.1)

Play-Cricket Results

It was hot this time. People who had been complaining that it wasn’t like Chennai last week were now complaining that it was too much like Chennai. Even that reminder didn’t stop some of our players addressing Tamilians in Hindi and wondering why it didn’t work.

Mizan, with Imran in his car, got lost in the Corsham one-way system, which meant that Joji did the toss, won it, elected to bat, and sent Jaideep and Krish out to open the batting. Mizan would have preferred to open, and after his innings at Hillesley he has a case, but he wasn’t there, and today was not to be his day with the bat. The opening bowlers were a brisk left-armer, who had caused us trouble under the very different conditions prevailing when we played at Corsham last September, and a young woman, a little less brisk but annoyingly accurate. She frustrated Krish, who tried to get off strike with an absurd single and would have been out with a direct hit, but fortunately the throw was inaccurate. This was a rare lapse: Corsham’s ground fielding was generally excellent. Even so, the openers went along steadily at five an over for a long time, past the 15-over drinks interval (very necessary), and they had reached 99 when Jaideep, who was on 49, ran himself out.

That began a long slow slide. Krish drove a catch to cover, Mizan flicked to fine leg, Joji miscued a legbreak, and Siddhant missed the leggie’s googly. It didn’t turn, but it didn’t have to. Apart from Siddhant, all of these got a start: so did Naveen and Kedar, and we briefly started thinking we might get to something well past 200. But the opening bowlers returned: she cleaned up Naveen and he cleaned up Kedar, Monish fell to a good catch, Ajeet was very much LBW and Gregory, trying to score the 200th run in the last over, ran Imran out.

Graham Gooch famously said that batting against New Zealand in the 1980s was like facing the World XI at one end (Hadlee’s) and Ilford 2nds at the other. Likewise, bowling to Corsham was like bowling to Ilford 2nds at one end and, say, Bath University Venturers at the other. Imran’s first over was a wicket maiden. His next two overs went for 40, and the two overs bowled by Krish from the other end were fractionally more economical only because he bowled a few more balls at the non-Ilford batsman. The problem was their wicketkeeper, almost the only member of their team over the age of 20 and a distinctly good batsman. Corsham is not a very big ground but some of his hits would have been six on the MCG. He only lost the ball once, despite the fierce notice up in the dressing rooms, illustrated with a skull and crossbones, telling players not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden to get the ball back.

Imran retreated and tried Mizan and Ajeet. That worked rather better, although the runs still kept coming, also from the other end to some degree. Siddhant got closer than we expected to a spiralling top edge off Ajeet, but couldn’t quite get there, let alone hang on. But Mizan simply bowled at the stumps, and didn’t get hit very much: he also bowled the other batsman and his successor. At this point the score was 93-3 in the tenth over (of potentially 40): the wicketkeeper had made 73 of them, including 64 in boundaries, from 26 balls. We could hope that he would run out of partners, especially since running quick singles to manipulate the strike would rapidly lead to heat exhaustion; or we could hope that he would retire on reaching a hundred, and that we could either bowl thirty overs for sixty runs and not take too many wickets, or take nine and then pick up the last wicket before he could make enough runs after unretiring.

Mizan hoped for none of these things. Instead, he stuck to his simple device of bowling at the stumps all the time, and the wicketkeeper missed one. And suddenly, we were strong favourites, because after cancelling the Ilford term from both sides of the equation they were 23 for four, chasing 126. We were fairly convinced that they didn’t have the batting to get those runs. Mizan hit the stumps again in the same over, Ajeet induced a catch to Joji, which he caught – this may seem unremarkable, but Joji was keeping wicket – and Mizan got two more wickets in the next over, one bowled and one LBW. That left him with six: in practice, bowlers who get five usually get taken off, so these were the best figures for us for some years. They had lost six wickets for nine runs, and Mizan had single-handedly won us the match. Ajeet and Gregory finished the job soon afterwards.