Report by Daniel Mortlock:
In a summer where the biggest film was Christopher Nolan's turgid interpretation of The Odyssey, it's perhaps appropriate that we'd have at least one Greek tragedy on our hands. The catalyst was, of course, hubris in the face of the Cricketing Gods, who presumably react with amused disdain whenever a club organiser sends out a message like "I've published teams for next week. Just about everyone gets one game, but only via the mechanism of naming twelves." Even They must have felt some level of challenge with 18 players available for this evening's game, and it did take them until a few hours before match time to craft the sequence of medical emergencies which forced the doctors in our side to stay late (and which of course also puts our cricketing dramas into some proper perspective). In the end we did field a full eleven thanks to Sumit Sahai agreeing to play for us despite having pulled out of opposition's eleven due to back problems and then Dave Green putting down his camera to field for us in shorts and trainers.
Still, things at least began well for us as Kanwar Singh smashed 1 6 4 6 . 1 to take us to 19/0 after the first (eight-ball) over . . .
. . . at which point we get one of our earliest ever paragraph breaks: Kanwar started the second over by bunting an innocuous full-toss straight to a fielder to be dismissed for an entertaining 18 off 7 balls; and then John Young and Cam Petrie found themselves trapped in the unwelcome land of dots and ones. Ignoring extras for the moment, John's innings began . . . 1 . . 1 1 4 . . . . 1 . (i.e., 8* off 15 balls) and Cam's sequence of 1 . . 1 1 . 1 . 1 1 . 1 1 (i.e., 8* off 13 balls) was so thematic that he requested confirmation from the scorer that he'd only scored in singles to this point. It was good classical batting and would have been superb in an afternoon game, but with only 96 balls available and plenty of strong batters still to come some more risk was required. John tried this first by responding to our increasingly crazed hollering to go for second runs, which both succeeded and failed: we did get some cheeky twos; but then John had to retire "knackered" (not for the first time) on 21* off 32 balls. Cam then strang to life, hitting three boundaries in an over to retire on 28* off 24 balls, after which Marcus Baker (17* off 13 balls), Simon Godsill (8 off 7 balls) and Trishant Simlai (4* off 3 balls) made the most of the limited opportunities now available.
The above might have made more sense if we'd been restricted by tight bowling and sharp fielding, but the grand total of 35 extras (only three of which were leg-byes) suggests this was not the case. Still, it did mean that our final total of 132/2 was at least competitive . . .
. . . at least for about two overs. We began our defense with James Robinson, playing his 100th Remnants game and who had specifically asked for the chance to bowl: having fallen by the wayside in the three-way race to be the season's top scorer, he'd instead set his sights on the bowling averages, as with 4 wickets at 3.25 he would go top over Kaleem Chatta (on 5 wickets at 4.20) if he could get the one wicket he needed to qualify while also conceding no more than 7 runs. Following in the footsteps of the great players who've taken up such challenges - think Greg Chappell announcing his retirement while needing 69 runs to go past Bradman's Test tally or Murali giving himself one final Test to get the eight wickets he needed to get to 800 - James revealed himself to be . . . a club cricketer who hasn't bowled much this season. After two legal deliveries his figures were 0/10 and the dream of topping the averages was already gone; by the end of the over Tek were 24/0, with their opener Samarth Malgotra on 16* off 7 balls, and our apparently healthy total was looking rather palid. (It was at this point that James revealed that he really wanted to be bowling from the other end.)
It was time for captain Daniel Mortlock to lead from the front and get things back under control, which he managed for precisely one delivery, a single, after which Malgotra smashed 4 4 4 1 with such rapidity that the scorers couldn't keep up - he should have retired on 28* off 10 balls rather than 29* off 11. After 2 overs the ball had crossed the boundary nine times - we managed just 11 boundaries in our whole innings - and Tek was on 42/0, having knocked off almost a third of their target.
We were still a chance if we could bowl brilliantly and field with conviction; but, with a few exceptions, we did neither. The one bright light with the ball was Trishant, who took 2/16 and was the only bowler to go for less than 10 an over, although both Sumit Sahai (0/22) and Faruk Kara (0/25) induced plenty of false shots and were unlucky not to get a wicket somewhere along the way, and James (0/31) came back with an excellent second over from his preferred end. Marcus was superb with the gloves, completing two stylish stumpings, as well as making some ultra-sharp leg-side takes. The rest of us without the gloves were, however, pretty poor, with a full bingo card of fielding fails: dropped catches; balls escorted to the boundary; overthrows after nobody backed up; wild throws to neither 'keeper nor bowler; sieve-like long barriers; and even comedic communications failure between James and Trishant when they either of them could have made an easy stop on the boundary, only to end up in a situation where Trish had the ball in his hand but had fallen over, so had to make an emergency transfer so James could complete the return.
With just five needed off the final two overs the game was done and Daniel offered the ball around but didn't get any takers, so opted to finish things off - well, to have things finished off - himself. With scores tied Marcus got his second stumping, which rather gifted Daniel (1/40) his 24th wicket of for the season (and so top wicket-taker for the 16th time), but a dismissive boundary from the new batter rather emphasised that, if the Cricketing Gods had taken a side it certainly wasn't ours.