Venturers Vs Bell CC, Wednesday June 24th

Bell CC 121-7 (20), Venturers 85-8 (20)

Play-Cricket Results

Brian Rix, the famous farcical actor (and cricket enthusiast), is estimated to have lost his trousers on stage twelve thousand times in twenty-six years, and today was a very hot day, so whoever it was who left the ground without their trousers after this match has some excuse. Leaving the bat behind as well is a little more careless, but it was almost dark by then, even on a cloudless day in late June. The match had taken a long time because everybody moved very slowly in the heat, and because we had three drinks intervals, not counting the interval between innings. We needed them.

Imran lost the toss, so we were fielding. We did quite well at first. Imran pinned one opener immediately, and he, Dinesh and Ajeet, Joji and Gregory kept things very quiet up to almost the halfway mark. At the start of the tenth over the score was 33-1: the other opener, in particular, had found scoring very difficult. His partner, however, launched a successful attack on Krish and also on Gregory, ultimately not quite so successful as he got stumped by Siddhant. He might have been up against a retirement rule anyway. The opener was involuntarily retired, partly because of the heat, partly because he had made 15 off 41 balls. Krish still wasn’t as effective as usual, so Imran went briefly back to himself and Ajeet to slow the scoring. That worked. Gregory was given another chance, and again gave away a few runs but got a wicket, and Dinesh, Joji and Imran did the rest. The last few overs included a solid catch by Siddhant off Dinesh, his first with the gloves on; a partly melted catch in the deep by Krish off Joji; and Imran bowling Ollie, playing against us, but not before he had done some damage.

We thought we had a chance of chasing 122 to win, although we knew to expect good bowling, but we got nowhere. Geraint, who had fielded with remarkable energy given the conditions, had injured himself walking back to his position in the field and batted with a runner. The usual chaos resulted (who should call?) but Geraint simply missed one before a runout could be arranged. He had taken nine balls over a duck: Ghulame, who followed, took twenty-one balls to make 3, and Joji took twelve to make 4. We were 22-3 at the end of the tenth over. Only Siddhant (and Bruce, who faced only one ball) reached the run-a-ball rate that was required, and there were not very many extras. Steve started slowly but accelerated a bit and ended up as top scorer: he and Siddhant made almost half our runs between them. First Dinesh and then Steve got run out for no particularly good reason, but our chances of winning had long gone by then.