Mortimer West End (A) – 27.4.14

Match called off due to rain

Another wet April weekend means RUASCC are O for 2 so far this season, though at least we can consider ourselves significantly more fortunate than Wirral CC whose Cheshire League game survived the weather on Saturday.

Chasing a modest 109 to win, Wirral’s first 10 batsmen were all dismissed without scoring (six were clean bowled).  Their only run off the bat was scored by their number 11 and even he was outscored by the two leg byes.  Two balls into the tenth over the innings was complete: three all out, and defeat by 105 runs.

I’m not sure what it was about this hapless and embarrassing batting collapse that got me thinking about RUASCC.  I remember a few Sunday afternoons when, facing nothing better than village bowling, the stumps suddenly feel six feet wide, the bat’s like a toothpick, the ball seems to nip both ways at 95mph and there are 42 fielders close in for the catch.  Where the opposition had been regularly finding the boundary, we can’t get the ball off the square.

It was mostly a very different story last season, of course - last season we were an unstoppable run-chasing machine.  In one of our most memorable wins from 2013, at Frieth, we started out having a bit of a Wirral - six wickets down in 12 overs – but spectacularly turned it round when a change of bowling allowed Main and Zia to go on the attack.  We finished with over 200 and won by 48 runs.

The Wirral story serves to remind me once again how glad I am to be a bowler.  An unlucky (or inept) batsman gets one chance and that’s it: your afternoon is over.  A bowler can serve up shit on toast for half an hour and still end up with half-decent figures.  Speaking as a number 11, the fragility of batting troubles me – there’s too much that can go wrong with such disastrous effect.  That’s where my crippling defensiveness comes from: fear of failure.  This is why I have the utmost respect for batsmen who embrace the loneliness, go for their shots and take control of the game.

I have no doubt that, come Saturday, one of those Wirral batsmen will stand tall, spank their first ball to the boundary and in that single stroke surpass the team’s total from last weekend.  Because the thing you have to remember about cricket is that you will fail, and sometimes you’ll fail huge, but there’ll always be another game.

That’s if it stops pissing it down.

Farley Hill (A) – 20.4.14

Match called off due to rain

Proper rain too, none of your drizzly shit.  It was dark by 11am.

One can only speculate as to how this match would have turned out had it not been for the entirely predictable downpour that followed two weeks of glorious sunshine and ruined the first day of the cricket season, but since Withers failed to attend any of the pre-season net sessions at least the Farley Hill batsmen were spared the looping head-high full tosses that would surely have been flung from his cold rusty shoulder.  Who knows what we may have missed?  An Eagle ton?  A Ken Stewart hatrick?  Dip getting caught at mid-on?  For now we must take solace in the fact that we have another Farley Hill fixture scheduled for June and move on to Mortimer West End on Sunday.

I must confess I wasn’t entirely ready for the season to start anyway; I tried to stop thinking about cricket after a very strange winter.  Now, in the aftermath, England are attempting to solve the problems that caused their crushing Ashes defeat by a) sacking their top run-scorer, and b) re-hiring the coach with the lowest win percentage of any England coach this century.  This will definitely work.

We might never know the full details of why Pietersen has been discarded, but by all accounts it seems to be based on the fact that he’s an arsehole.  This was overlooked, of course, when he scored loads of runs - maybe the run scoring made him less of an arsehole to be around, we just don’t know.  Evidently what happened in Australia was that he dipped below some critical threshold of run:arsehole ratio and the selectors were forced to act.

It’s all rather farcical and confusing but it also leaves me fearful for the future of RUASCC.  If we were suddenly forced to drop all the arseholes who don’t score enough runs we’d be woefully short of players – basically just Zia running around in a field.

Assuming we don’t start applying this rigorous selection policy I’ll be back with another report after the weekend.

Tilehurst & Theale (at Leighton Park School) – 8.9.13

Tilehurst & Theale 110 all out

Saad 3-17, Main 3-32

RUASCC 111-0

J. Singh 75 not out, Eagle 29 not out

RUASCC won by 10 wickets

Our first “home” game of the season resulted in a comfortable run chase, the first ten-wicket win I can remember in my decade playing for the club.  Tilehurst brought a young team and RUASCC ultimately proved too strong with both bat and ball.

The players were greeted at Leighton Park by rain, and though the game began in sunshine another heavy shower forced a 20-minute break and a hasty arrangement of the covers by some soggy old cricketers.  Although a cold wind persisted, conditions improved and play continued uninterrupted until the winning boundary was scored soon after 6pm.

Eagle won the toss and chose to field, and for the fourth game in a row Withers made the initial breakthrough when a leading edge flew to Obaid at mid-on.  Then Saad took over, full of pre-match Red Bull and hurtling in for ten violent overs against batsmen ill-equipped to either attack or defend against the pace, bounce and wild screams of “CATCH!”  So demanding is Saad of his fielders that he insists they catch the ball whether or not it hits the bat, whether it’s in the air or on the floor and completely irrespective of whether there’s a single person within 25 yards of it.

Nevertheless Saad took the next three wickets to fall, all thanks to catches by close fielders, and Main’s first wicket kicked off a collapse from 80-4 to 110 all out in the 35^th over.

As it turned out Dr Eagle didn’t need to spend much time thinking about his batting order.  Jas Singh went on a bit of a rampage, reaching fifty with his 11^th four, and even Eagle got creative with a six over backward square leg as the opening pair knocked off the runs in just 17.3 overs - much to the annoyance of Andy Greenhalf, all padded up with nowhere to go.

RUASCC Highlight:  “CATCH!”

RUASCC Man of the Match:  Jas Singh.

RUASCC Team:  J. Singh, Eagle (capt), Zia, Greenhalf, Obaid, Partridge (wkt), Tranter, Saad, Main, Ashman, Withers

Hambleden (A) – 1.9.13

Hambleden 128-7 (40 overs)

Withers 3-14, Ashman 2-24

RUASCC 131-2 (22.5 overs)

Zia 63 not out, Eagle 27

RUASCC won by 8 wickets

I love playing at Hambleden - there’s something about it that seems to sum up for me what it is to play for RUASCC.  It’s not a great wicket, there’s a forty-foot slope from one side of the ground to the other and you know you’re going to get skittled out by someone bowling off one pace, but it’s a wonderfully picturesque setting and when you’re out there in the middle you feel you could be playing cricket in the 1950s.

The facilities have been brought up to date this year - a brand new pavilion replaces the old shed that had to be torn down after Ken Stewart’s last toilet visit.  But what may quite soon become apparent is that I’m writing this match report nearly three months after the game without sight of the scorebook and I have very little idea what actually happened.  I took down the salient details: I know we won, for example, but apart from a couple of notes I made at the time I’d really just be guessing at the rest of it.  But with the AGM next Friday I wanted to get the season up to date, so let’s give it a go.

I did at least write down this bit:

The game began with another potent spell from Withers, continuing his improved form of recent weeks, and he removed both openers in his first six overs, which included four maidens.  First an outswinging delivery was edged to Dip behind the stumps before Zia took a great one-handed catch at short extra cover.  Main also picked up a wicket and Hambleden limped along to 24-3 from the first 15 overs.

What, then, can we deduce?  Well, Hambleden finished on 128-7 so that means they scored 104-4 from their final 25 overs.  There, you see, I’ve got this licked now.  To this I can add that Nick Arnold came in at number three and stayed almost till the end; he eventually fell in Withers’ last over, the ugliest caught-and-bowled you’ll ever see.  That Withers, he is good isn’t he.

I’ll tell you what though, I can’t remember anything else.  It says up there that The Good Dr Ashman took a couple of wickets so that’s bound to be true.  Ask him sometime, I bet he could tell you all about it.

Eagle dropped a catch at mid-on, claiming he was distracted by the sun.  That’s right, it was sunny!  Tranter suggested that Eagle would have caught the ball had he been wearing a cap, though this perhaps places rather too much credit to the skill-enhancing powers of casual headgear.  It was off Kenny’s bowling I think, so no damage done.

That’s that then.  Tea!  It was laid out on a table, definitely on a table.  A table near a wall.  I’m going to stick my neck out and say there were some plates.  Chicken!  There was chicken I think.  I might be thinking of somewhere else.

And then we batted!

We lost two wickets: Carpenter and Eagle.  Eagle made more runs than Carpo on this occasion.  Zia seems to have done rather well, scoring 63 not out.

Look, it’s a puppy drinking Ribena!

What we can be certain of is that, asked to chase 129 in 40 overs, we seem to have polished it off in less than 23.  Well done everyone, well done.

Oh, and according to the team list Channy was playing.  I bet he fielded well, he always fields very well.

RUASCC Highlight:  Oh, all of it.  It was such a memorable day, you know.

RUASCC Man of the Match:  An unbeaten fifty at Hambleden, got to be Zia.

RUASCC Team:  Carpenter, Eagle (capt), Zia, Dip (wkt), Malde, Main, Tranter, Withers, Ashman, Stewart

Frieth (A) – 25.8.13

RUASCC 208-9 (35 overs)

Zia 83 not out, Main 59

Frieth 160-9 (35 overs)

Withers 4-21, Ben 2-37

RUASCC won by 48 runs

After an hour of this match I was already writing a report in my head about yet another dismal score on this ground: put into bat first in a 35-over game, RUASCC had collapsed to 43-6.  12 overs in and Dr Ashman was padding up!

Left-armer Harry Williams caused havoc in the top order, first producing a beauty to bowl Ward (3), then taking Malde (1) and Weeks (4) while Carpenter (0) and Saad (1) were also dismissed cheaply.  Debutant Ben hit a quick 20 before he was bowled by Peter Smiley as the two opening bowlers threatened to run through the whole team.  Obviously we missed the steadying influence of Andy Eagle, dodging mountains in Portugal.

At this point the home captain opted to make a game of it and made changes at both ends, a decision that suited Bruce Main as he hit a six and three fours from McKenzie’s first over the followed it up with two fours and another six, thus doubling the RUASCC total in his first three overs at the crease.

Main took the bowling apart and comfortably outscored Zia (even the return of Williams to bowl his final two overs couldn’t shift him) and he raced to an incredible fifty with his tenth boundary.  The pair added 95 before Main, perhaps inevitably, holed out to deep square leg.

Then Zia took over.  From 33 not out at the time of Main’s wicket, Zia marshalled the strike while first Stewart, then Ashman and Withers, held up the other end.  70 runs were added in the last 14 overs, 50 of them coming from Zia who posted his highest score of the season.  Finally, a total at Frieth that we could defend!

On an otherwise sunny and warm afternoon tea was briefly extended by a hailstorm which mercifully passed over quite quickly, and the resulting muggy air and damp pitch proved very much to Withers’ liking.  Finding plenty of movement and passing the bat on numerous occasions, Withers eventually got the breakthrough bowling Tanveer through the gate.  Saad, bowling very fast and straight from the other end, perhaps forced the batsmen into playing some risky shots against Withers’ medium pace and soon Williams was caught at slip by Ashman.

Two more wickets fell in Withers’ final over, including the dangerous Ben Smiley caught and bowled, before our Ben (a friend of Zia) picked up his first RUASCC wicket as Frieth’s top order fared little better than RUASCC’s.  From 58-5 the home side rallied as Peter Smiley hit a confident fifty but with overs running out they never looked like reaching their target.

A stroke of good fortune saw Ian McKenzie run out at the non-striker’s end off Main’s fingertips and Bruce capped a good day at the office with a wicket from the very next ball.  With the result no longer in doubt Smiley was eventually bowled by Ben for 56 and the innings petered out, although not before Saad returned to take the ninth wicket thanks to a catch by Weeks behind the stumps.

So another superb win, the 11^th of the season for RUASCC, and a bowling performance notable for the fact that Zia didn’t feel the need to bring himself on at all.

RUASCC Highlight:  Having smashed a quick 40 off the change bowlers Main was suddenly faced with the return of opening quick Harry Williams - and met his first ball with the most elaborate, un-Bruce-like forward defensive stroke.

RUASCC Man of the Match:  A few contenders this week, as Zia top scored with 83 and Withers ran through the Frieth top order, but for the way his astonishing innings turned the game completely around it has to be Bruce Main.

RUASCC Team:  Ward, Carpenter, Ben, Malde, Weeks (wkt), Zia (capt), Saad, Main, Stewart, Ashman, Withers

Sixpenny Handley (Tour) – 11.8.13

RUASCC 206-6 (40 overs)

Ward 56, Eagle 29

Sixpenny Handley 100-9 (all out, 27.3 overs)

Stewart 3-14, Withers 3-19

RUASCC won by 106 runs

The second match of the tour, and by now the resentment had started to set in.  We’d been stuck with each other for three days, we’d been staying in a filthy hotel with inexplicable evening “entertainment” and at least one member of the team had been guided into a local bush after an evening in Vodka Revolution.  We’d had a pizza together, we’d had a curry together, we’d had a few drinks together… at this precise moment, 2pm on Sunday afternoon, we didn’t want to see any of our teammates ever again, let alone play cricket with them.

With no game on the Saturday we were free to pursue other activities.  Baker, Main and Withers set off for yet another coastal walk and several others went for a round of golf before we all convened in the Walkabout to watch Chris Rodgers and Shane Watson rescue another perilous situation for the Australians in Durham.  Kenny Stewart lost his glasses then went out to buy a new shirt, ending up with the kind of shirt you could only buy if you’ve lost your glasses.

So to finish the tour we just had to pass one more test: the fixture against Sixpenny Handley, another wonderful purpose-built facility with cricket pitch, tennis courts and recreation hall.  Skipper Eagle lost the toss and we were asked to bat first in a 40-over game.

Scoring didn’t come naturally on an unpredictable wicket and Ward accumulated only in singles while Eagle, naturally, accumulated only in edges down to third man.  Having put on 60 Eagle was the first to go when he was run out.  Zia repeated his score from the previous game (hitting one six and one four to make a quick ten) before being trapped LBW by one of several that kept very low.

In a playful shake-up of the batting order Richard Tranter was next in and he made a handy 19 in his long-running chase to reach 5,000 club runs.  Meanwhile Ward eventually started finding the boundary despite having to face a bowler who sent the ball 22 yards high but barely 18 across.  On a number of occasions Wardy found himself beaten by the absurd flight and yet still able to comfortably regain his ground before the ball passed the stumps.

Nevertheless our opening batsman passed fifty for the second time on tour and then decided it was time to give others a go and got himself bowled.  Stewart (11) and Weeks (14) did their bit in the middle order but runs only really started to flow when Malde and Baker, who had been itching to get out to the middle, added 39 in the last four overs to take us past 200.

From the looks on the faces of the home side at tea we suspected we might have scored enough, but when ten runs came from the first two overs we had momentary cause to question our optimism.  Not for long though: wickets in each of the next three overs (two for Withers, one for Zia) made headway into the top order, and a flurry of boundaries from Nodder ended when a full toss from Carpenter was miscued to the bucket hands of Bruce Main at mid-off.

Main’s bowling proved too hot to handle as his five overs went for a mere three runs, while Withers was removed from the attack having taken 2-5, which gave Ken Stewart the chance to run through the lower order taking an impressive 3-14.

With only one wicket remaining the home side did at least reach 100 before death bowler Mike Ward came on to take the final wicket of tour.  A just reward and a fitting end for our undoubted Player of the Series.

Those tour stats in full:

Games Played: 2

Games Won: 2

Highest Run Scorer: Ward (106)

Highest Wicket Taker: Stewart (4)

Most Catches: Eagle, Baker, Main and Ward (1 each)

Mildest Curry: Withers (pasanda)

Purplest Shirt: Stewart (hideous)

Loudest Snorer: Main (troubled)

Until next year then, I’m sick of the lot of you.

RUASCC Highlight:  Tremendous diving catch by wicketkeeper Baker to dismiss Patel after the ball had brushed a glove and looped up in front of square.

RUASCC Man of the Match:  It’s Ward again!

RUASCC Team:  Ward, Eagle (capt), Zia, Tranter, Stewart, Weeks, Baker (wkt), Malde, Carpenter, Main, Withers

Pimperne (Tour) – 9.8.13

Pimperne 138-6 (20 overs)

Zia 2-11, Main 1-14

RUASCC 139-4 (17.5 overs)

Ward 50, Malde 34

RUASCC won by 6 wickets

Friday evening of Tour, a sunny evening in Dorset and a picturesque cricket ground – this is the best part of the weekend, before we all hate each other and the bitter recriminations begin, like a warring family at Christmas.  Withers, Baker and Main had spent the day walking on the south coast; Ward and Weeks had been for a couple of pints – everyone prepares for cricket in his or her own way.

The game: a 20:20 encounter on an astro pitch, with Zia captaining and Eagle pushed down to number 11.  Pimperne won the toss and predictably chose to bat to get the best of the daylight.  Withers and Baker started well and after two overs it was 7-1, then Withers got clubbed for a four and six before Main came on and bowled the other opener.

Carpenter (bowling spin) and Stewart (“bowling”) grabbed a wicket apiece and the home side were 61-4 in the 12^th.  Zia started well, going for just one run in each of his first two overs, and threatened to expose the tail but the Pimperne number six was an entirely different beast.

First Stewart took some hammer as House launched three consecutive, enormous, sixes over long-on.  Baker returned and went for 25 in one over; the fifth wicket pair added 54 before Moore was dismissed for just 1!

Zia restored order with two quick wickets but House was still there and took 10 from the final over to finish on 74 not out.  Probably a good thing he didn’t come in any earlier.

Despite a dodgy start (Carpenter was bowled in the first over) RUASCC always looked in control of the run chase.  Ward played and missed early on and offered a couple of chances but soon settled down to play the perfect innings for a T20 opener.  Malde went on the attack and the pair posted a half-century stand before Chan was dismissed.

Johnny Baker, playing for only the second time this season, continued to push the score along with some quick singles before a knackered Wardy reached exactly 50 and got himself out.  Tom Weeks was bowled just ten runs short of the line but Zia came in and promptly knocked them off in two deliveries.  A comfortable win and a successful start to the tour!

RUASCC Highlight:  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?” – as keeper Ward looked for a run out at the non-striker’s end, bowler Withers appeared less optimistic about the chances of success.  The result: one overthrow.

RUASCC Man of the Match:  Ward - for his work with the bat, not the gloves.

RUASCC Team:  Carpenter, Ward (wkt), Malde, Baker, Weeks, Zia (capt), Main, Tranter, Stewart, Withers, Eagle