Venturers Vs Beehive, Sunday June 14th

Venturers 232-7 (40), Beehive 99-7 (28.2)

Play-Cricket Results

Jaideep said before the game that if he made a hundred he would dedicate it to Kane Williamson; if 25, to Ben Stokes; and if a duck, to Gus Atkinson. He made 11, leaving him unsure what to do. He also spent most of the rest of the game threatening to retire. He had got bowled trying something ambitious, which is uncharacteristic. Mizan fell soon afterwards to a good catch at square leg, explaining afterwards that he had run out of luck, and Joji chipped a return catch. Although we had been scoring quite briskly, we were now in some trouble. There wasn’t a lot more batting to come: we needed Naveen and Jonathan to stay there. Naveen is a slow starter, but he doesn’t get impatient. He survived a confident appeal for a catch at the wicket: there was a noise, but he didn’t appear to have hit it, and later his kit twice made the same noise when he clearly hadn’t hit the ball, so this was almost certainly correct. Jonathan prospered thanks to sound defence, ability to find the gaps, and luck borrowed from Mizan: he scored five off his first ball, thanks to a wild return over the keeper’s head). We were not yet out of the woods when Jonathan swept, missed, and was stumped, toe on the line. Somehow this set off the fire alarm, and there was a break in play while we checked that nobody was in the pavilion, and that the pavilion wasn’t ablaze. Siddhant played sensibly for a while, but then also missed a sweep against the same bowler, and was bowled round his legs. Monish was leg before next ball, possibly going over, and we were back in trouble again.

Naveen and Dinesh were very much the last line of defence, but they quickly looked impossible to separate. Naveen was beginning to be destructive, and Beehive were starting to run out of bowlers. Things only improved for them when their delayed player arrived and proved to be a capable bowler. Joji’s 10-year-old son had agreed to play for them too, as they were two short anyway, and he also bowled, fairly well, but without success. Imran, who wanted to bat, tried to get Dinesh to retire at 50, but then it would have been hard to explain why that hadn’t applied to Naveen. In the very last over, though, things went wrong. Naveen had 96 but Dinesh was on strike. He got the single he wanted, and Naveen turned down a single next ball. Off the third ball he changed his mind and accepted the single, and Dinesh got another single off the fourth. But Naveen hit the fifth ball high to mid-off and was out for 97, and Imran faced one ball.

We had actually supplied tea. It had taken Joji and Gregory several overs to sort the M&S sandwiches into vegetarian, fish, and haram (everything else): this was time well spent. We will do it again.

We didn’t know what to expect of Beehive’s batting, but two of the three who had looked the most competent in the field (Beehive were generally competent in the field) opened the batting and looked competent at that, too. They didn’t find scoring off Imran and Dinesh easy, but neither did they get out. Imran tried Joji and Ajeet instead, with similar results until Joji won an LBW decision (possibly high, possibly missing leg, but also possibly out) and then immediately another one (definitely out) next ball. That was it for a while. Mizan took over from Ajeet and was a little wayward: Gregory took over from Joji and was not. It was Mizan, though, who removed the other opener, a third LBW, also definitely out. There was one good batsman left, but the others were not rabbits. One of them gave Mizan a straightforward catch off one of Gregory’s less accurate balls, Another edged Jonathan to slip, where Jaideep took a splendid catch and stopped retiring. Eventually Gregory bowled the real batsman, and then there was only one wicket left, since they were one short, one was absent injured (dedicated to Ollie Robinson) as a result of bowling, and Joji’s son could not bat for want of a helmet. Jaideep and Siddhant were allowed to compete for the last wicket. Siddhant won..