With the World Cup quarter final inconveniently scheduled in the middle of today’s play and the league having no interest in this national event, we started one hour early and hoped for the best.
We got off to a great start, John (41) taking 14 off the opening Gt Waltham over and together with Nob (38) put on 88 in the opening 18 overs, but then it all went horribly wrong. Losing both openers in the space of 6 balls sparked an all too familiar Totham collapse, losing 9 wickets for 78 and leaving Foxy stranded. A mixture of poor shots, no foot movement and a reluctance to build an innings and grind out some runs on a pitch that was not the easiest to score on. Only some brilliant hitting from George Davis (37*) got us a score of 204 and a respectable, if under par score.
The Waltham openers had 6 overs to negotiate before the break to watch the football and they did so without alarm. George Davis, who had a fine game with both bat and ball, made the breakthrough after the break when he snuck one under the openers bat. Ridgey replaced George and bowled well but fell victim to the 2 no-ball rule, which meant Jimmy was introduced earlier than usual, and he bowled Whettel with his first ball. John tied up the other end with a tidy 10 over spell of 2-22, but our problem was in the field. Too many miss fields, drop catches, poor throws to the keeper and not paying attention at a left/right combo. We must have given away 30+ runs in midfields alone, which is incredibly frustrating. We have a lot of guys who want to make the permanent jump from the 3rd XI to the 2nd XI, for that to happen standards must improve. So must the amount of short balls and full tosses which we ball.
Needless to say we lost. Opposition opener Nindi ended up with 100, he always get runs against us, and the visitors saw it home with just over 3 overs to spare.
We go again next week.
