Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Yet another defeat at the hands of the Woozlers was all but inevitable from the moment this evening's team was "selected" and published on Pitchero. The batting was strong, so no obvious problem there, with our eventual top order of Seb, Tom, Cam, Marcus and Chris all in the runs this season; we were spoilt for choice on the wicket-keeping front, as any of Ev, Marcus, Seb, Neil or Cam could have reasonably taken the gloves; and so by now you've already worked out that the issue was the bowling. The only players in the starting eleven to have bowled more than two overs for Remnants this season were Daniel, Faruk, Sasha and Seb. So the first thing to do was get the Woozlers to agree to play twelve-a-side in the hope that we could find (at least) one more bowler, which we got in the form of Lahiru (although even he had only sent down three overs for Remnants prior to today).
Whether this was going to be enough was put to the test immediately as the Woozlers won the toss (or possibly the pre-match cattle-trading) and unsurprisingly opted to bat first. The new ball was taken by the only seamers in the side, Seb Hammersley (0/13) and Daniel Mortlock (2/13, taking him to 450 Remnants wickets), who both got plenty of movement of the pitch and in the air. Despite some fielding which might be best described as "porous", we'd restricted the Woozlers to just 20/1 after the first five-over "end". (We were experimenting with a new time-saving approach: 20 six-ball overs delivered in four batches of five ends; it actually worked quite well.)
The middle half of our innings (i.e., overs 6-15) was pretty evenly balanced. The scoring rate increased - castration is too good for anyone who says the scoring rate accelerated - but never got out of hand, as Lahiru Wijedasa (1/18 in three one-over "spells") justified his late inclusion and Marcus Baker (0/13) repeatedly spun the ball past the bat. By this stage visiting Remnants Legend Tony Malik had come out to do umpiring duties - although most of his energies were put into unsolicited coaching advice to any player within earshot. (One of our more recent recruits later innocently asked if "he used to play for Remnants", a question which is perhaps best answered by a quick look at the list of players with the most all-round points, headed by Tony with daylight second.) It's not clear Tony's advice actually had much effect on the bowling, but the fielding did improve. The clear highlight was Neil Grover's stunning one-handed interception of a hard-hit cover drive, which he followed up with a quick throw which would have run out the non-striker, who hadn't had time to regain his ground, but was a smidge off target. After 15 overs the Woozlers were 90/3 - hardly a disaster, but we were definitely the happier of the two sides . . .
. . . although that perhaps required some degree of wishful thinking, given that ex-Blues player and perenial Remnants torturer Ed Hyde was at the crease and had carefully played himself in. Sure enough, Ed now cut loose, hitting 41 runs from 18 balls during this phase, either smashing the ball over the long leg-side boundary or playing reverse sweeps to attack the shorter boundary, both with considerable success. Even when Ed retired (on 52* off 28 balls) off the third last ball of the innings there was no let-up as the new batter finished the innings with a dismissive boundary to take his side past 150. We'd leaked 63 runs from our the end (sounds like a medical condition) and were very much coming second at the change-over.
The instructions to our strong top order was to make use of the higher than usual retirement score of fifty and play proper innings: our best chance of a win was to have a couple of batters get themselves in and then bat through. This proved to a bit more challenging than we'd hoped, as the The Woozlers' pre-match talk about being short of bowling and "only having leg-spinners" proved to be false on both counts: while they did only use five bowlers, all bar Quentin bowled at a decent clip, which broadly confirmed medium pace was the best option for this wicket. Despite the early departure of Seb Hammersley (26 off 20 balls) we were definitely in the hunt with the score 75/1 after 11 overs: scoring 79 off the 54 remaining deliveries wasn't going to be easy, but with two set batters at the crease we could reasonably hope for an acceleration . . .
. . . whereas we instead got a capitulation as Sam Grimshaw (3/8) bowled a match-winning spell of fast leg-spinners (which is kind of ironic, given that fast bowling is his actual area of professional expertise, having just published a comprehensive review of the physics of swing). With Ed also bowling well at the other end we lost 4 wickets for just 3 runs and scored just 10 runs in overs 11-16. It was, to quote Corporal Hicks from Aliens, "game over, man, game over!" Chris Badger (24* off 20 balls) batted well but was in too late to make an impact on the result; and Lahiru (12 off 13 balls) supported him effectively before being well caught on the leg-side boundary by Marcus, sub-fielding for the Woozlers - cue a quality round of pantomime booing, which was arguably more effective than anything else we did on the field this evening.
