Kingswood Vs Venturers, Wednesday May 13th

Kingswood 136-6, Venturers 124-5

The astonishing things about this match was that we turned up not just with a full XI but actually with XII: furthermore, so did the opposition, equally unexpectedly. The presence of an extra fieldsman slowed the scoring only a little.

The Kingswood match is never close. This one looks reasonably close in the scorebook, but we were always losing and only Tayo’s late hitting got us anywhere near.

Chris’s opening spell rendered one of the Kingswood openers almost shotless, not just then but for the rest of his innings except when Gregory bowled him a slow full toss. He was eventually forcibly retired by his teammates, after batting for ten over for 14 not out. His partner was more positive, at least against Tayo and at least to start with, but Tayo tightened up his line soon and induced a skied swish, which Rob caught competently. Rob’s bowling was less competent but only one batsman was scoring and he soon walked past a ball from Gregory that did nothing in particular. The next batsman also attacked Gregory indiscriminately, scoring twelve from three balls and picking out Matt off the fourth. The retirement of the opener meant that runs came at both ends, but apart from a single misdirected over from Dhruva they did so fairly slowly, and we picked up a couple more wickets: one bowled by Dhruva, finding his range again, and a second and more difficult catch for Rob, off Simon. Steve bowled the final over, and went for sixteen from five balls (the umpire lost count) as the batsmen slogged at everything, but Roger got a second stumping in the process.

We kept in touch to begin with, Chris and Matt rotating the strike, but gradually fell behind after Matt was bowled, as Shrey was unable to find the singles. Eventually he was also bowled, by the sports teacher having a go at slow left arm (he is completely right-handed) and surprising himself, his teammates and, crucially, Shrey by getting one in the right place. Reverting to his usual style he also removed Chris. Azhar and Steve could maintain the run rate but not raise it. Roger did raise it when he arrived, and at the very end Tayo raised it quite a lot with a series of clean strikes and complete misses. At the very end, though, we need two more clean strikes from two balls, and he missed both of them.