Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Having last night come second against St Barnabas Church, a side we last lost to in 2012, it was hard not to feel pessimistic about our chances this evening against The Woozlers, against whom our recent record is even worse - we'd won just once against them in 18 completed games since 2014. So it is hence borderline astonishing to report the most comfortable of victories in a game that we bossed from the second over onwards.
Our first success was, however, even earlier when we lost the "toss" and were invited to bat - perfect given our monster top-order. (The reason for the inverted commas is that nothing was actually tossed: in the absence of a coin The Woozlers captain, Ed Hyde, was guided through a two-step process in which he was first invited to choose a digit - from 1 to 16 - from Daniel's debit card and then asked to guess whether it's even or odd; Ed guessed correctly that the sixth digit of the card is, indeed, odd.)
After only three runs came from the first over there was a brief moment of concern that we were going to repeat last night's "go slow", but Temoor Khan (40* retired off 32 balls) and Cam Petrie (34 off 24 balls) then sprang (sprung?) to life in an eight-ball sequence of 4 2 4 4 | 4 . 4 4 in which we scored as many runs (26) as we did in the first eight overs yesterday. The closest The Woozlers came to taking a wicket was when Cam latched onto a huge drive which had us spectators craning our necks to see where it would sail over the boundary . . . only to find our own Quentin Harmer there, steadying right on the line to take attempt what would be a fantastic, if treacherous, overhead catch . . . but he couldn't quite hold on, and so had to content with saving five runs. Still, even if the catch had been taken it seems unlikely that this would have slowed our scoring, as each wicket/retirement just brought in a new gun batter, as Hume Fisher (25 off 18 balls), Seb Hammersley (15* off 15 balls) and Stuart Cronin (27* off 15 balls) all kept up the openers' good work. Our scoring rate barely dropped below 10 per (eight-ball) over all innings, and our eventual total of 152/3 was one of our best ever early season efforts.
Rather annoyingly, our imposing total did not mean a won game as the The Woozlers - and particularly their engine room of Ed Hyde, Sam Grimshaw and Ryan Bridger, all present today - had previously blitzed comparable chases in 2010, 2011, 2015 (when, spookily, they scored 152/3 in 14 eight-ball overs, identical to us today) and 2019. Our defense began well: Daniel Mortlock (2/17) would have started his season with a double-wicket maiden but for a chance off the final ball of his first over going to ground; and Naveen Chouksey (1/17) took his 99th Remnants wicket and then twice beat the edge to go within a hair of his 100th. With Tim Simmance (0/19) coming back well after a poor start - he conceded just three runs from his last ten deliveries - we restricted The Woozlers to just 44/2 from the first 7-over "end".
With the long boundary now on the leg-side, we turned to our nominally slower bowlers (although the actual difference in pace across our attack today was minimal) and by the time Natasha Rutterford (1/34) and Sasha Vail (0/19) had finished their tidy spells The Woozlers' chase was done - and that despite Ryan (40* retired off 46 balls) and Sam (33* off 20 balls) both having scored freely and Ed (6 off 7 balls) only dismissed because he had to gamble in gloomy conditions (which made Cam's otherwise simple catch more impressive, even if the biggest challenge was ignoring 'keeper Andy Owen's screams of "Cam! Catch it! It's coming to you! Cam!"). The only danger now was that the dark clouds would deliver the forecast rain, so TK got thrown the ball in the hope he'd be able to race through the final over quickly. This he duly did, conceding just two singles and taking a wicket when Daniel, having him moved himself to slip the ball before, was presented with a simple catch (his second of the night), a moment which encapsulated an evening where just about everything went right.