Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Through some thirty seasons Remnants Cricket Club has maintained a proud tradition of never conceding more than 234 runs in an evening friendly match.
We upheld that tradition today.
Details are sketchy at present, but captain du jour George Speller, who'd described himself as the club "anti-talisman" before the match, reported simply that we were "shat on".
But Rob Harvey claimed that we weren't only shat on, but then "pissed on and run over by a large military vehicle" (which at least now presumably has poo in its tyre treads, possibly causing mild nausea for the driver and passengers).
Non-participant/victim Dave Green corroborated that, "Indeed yesterday's game was a definite stuffing. I turned up with The CB XI on 157 off 10 overs . . . but became 20% happier when I discovered it was 10 eight-ball overs, not 10 six-ball overs!" Dave also promised to send some pictures, although one suspects they're not for the faint-hearted. Neither, of course, are the numbers, and in the absence of a match report from a witness, it's to the hard facts that we must turn.
Almost unbelieveably, The CB XI's innings began with a maiden as Himanshu Agrawal (1/26) stopped the opposition opener, Ed Craigen, from scoring from the first 7% of his team's innings. Unfortunately it seems this was more along the lines of "playing himself in" than "being unable to score" and his full innings makes for rather absurd reading: . . . . . . . . 4 . 2 . 1 1 4 4 1 . 4 . . 4 1 2 4 1 . 2 4 4 1 4 4 6 4 6 4 4 4 1 4 4 4 4 4 4 1 2 6 at which point he retired, presumably embarrassed, having scored 114* from 49 balls, with 20 fours and 3 sixes. Even more unbelievably, the second half of his innings was a dot-free sequence of 79 runs from 21 balls, only 5 runs short of a four every ball! Remnants have been subjected to some serious humiliations over the years - an inevitability given the number of quality cricketers around Cambridge - but this ranks up there with the best/worst of them, maybe topped only by the 143 smashed by Granta's grumpy opener back in 2003.
Maybe even more amazing is that Craigen's impressive run-rate of 13.96 (or, if you like, a strike-rate of 232.65) was only marginally greater than his team's overall run-rate of 11.70 per (six-ball) over. Needless to say the bowling figures were horrendous, too, although . . . actually, no although - next best after Himanshu was George Speller (0/24) who was the only other bowler to concede runs at fewer than 11.00 per six balls. All this meant comfortably the biggest total ever scored against us (even including all-day games): the previous record for evening games was the paltry 196/6 that Granta made in the above-mentioned game.
On the batting front it was pretty clear we were never going to make a game of it (although presumably most South Africans thought the same thing when Australia posted 434/4 against them back in 2006), but we at least weren't blown away. Tom Serby (29 off 22 balls), Rob Harvey (20* off 33 balls) and Tom Jordan (44 off 54 balls) all played nice innings and maybe got their eyes in well enough to get us a win the following night (on which all three were down to play).
As for tonight, though, maybe we should have taken on The CB V or similar instead . . .