Report by Daniel Mortlock:
At the end of Apollo 13 mission commander Jim Lovell (as played by Tom Hanks) notes that the cause of the explosion in his spacecraft was "a minor defect that occurred two years before I was even named the flight's commander." And so it was for us this evening: the result of today's game can be traced back to a seemingly insignificant decision a week earlier, when Daniel cleaned out his wallet in preparation for an overseas trip. In doing so he misplaced the magic coin which unfailingly induced opposition captains to call incorrectly all through June and July.
Heading out to the middle with a regulation coin, it was hence obvious that the opposition captain, Imran Maqbool, would call correctly at the toss and opt to bat first with the hard ball in the heat . . . although it was less clear exactly which opposition was being captained. The fixture list said it was AVEVA; but there were very few familiar faces from our game against them back in June. The explanation was that AVEVA couldn't field a team themselves (players on holiday, the same excuse offered up less plausibly by Saltburn CC today for withdrawing from their league match, the proximity to the finger-clicking scandal a pure coincidence). So Imran had called on his league club of Nassington to provide the necessary players, most of whom were of a worryingly high standard. There was brief talk of naming the side Avevington or Nasseva; sadly they went for just Nassington.
Our time in the field can best be summed up by two facts: none of our six bowlers conceded less than ten runs per (eight-ball) over; and four of our seven wickets were catches in the deep that weren't really much to do with the bowling. First up was Cam Petrie who, once he was alerted to the fact the ball was travelling in his direction, stopped chatting to the spectators and completed a neat take at square-leg off the bowling of Trishant Simlai (1/43). Then Quentin Harmer took his 8th grab in 8 games this summer, putting him in the all-time top ten for most catches in a season, an impressive achievement made even more so by the fact that almost all the higher entries either played many more matches or regularly kept wicket (or both). The only real exception was when Remnants legend Mike Sneyd (who, sadly, died earlier in the summer) took 9 catches in 11 games back in 1980. Then we got the star moment of the innings when Nassington's best batter launched a huge drive off Sujay Iyer (2/27) to the longest boundary where Lahiru Wijedasa kept edging back before finally being in position to take a great overhead catch. Finally, Yash Verma wrapped things up with a very cool take running in from cow corner. Such good efforts notwithstaning, fielding was otherwise pretty miserable with the ball scooting across the dry ground and repeatedly having to be retrieved from hedges or under cars. Indeed, it's arguable our most successful effort was by Danny Evetts, who limped off with a pulled muscle after a few overs, thus avoiding most of the carnage.
Nassington's batting wasn't amazing - there were lots of edges and mis-hits - so much as opportunistic, with big swings taken at anything offline . . . which, frustratingly, much of our bowling was. The best of the bowlers was Francois Rossouw (2/30), who found the "Goldilocks zone" of not being so slow that the batters could play tee ball, but not giving enough pace that innocuous edges would fly to the boundary. Everyone else fell into one of those categories and overall 30 of the 114 legitimate balls we sent down were hit for four or six. Nassington's final total of 191/7 was comfortably the highest in any of our games this season and it was hard not to believe the game was over as a contest.
Still, we did give it a shot as our opening pair of Yash Verma and Martin Heginbotham went beserk. After 5 overs we were 73/0, naively suggesting we were on track for a 10-wicket victory with 2 overs to spare. And even when Martin retired (on 41* off 19 balls) and then Yash was well caught (for 36 off 26 balls), Cam Petrie picked up the baton to race to 19* off 8 balls . . . only to lose his head and be bowled going for a big swipe at the exact half-way point of the innings. That, effectively was the moment our chase was done: where we'd scored 102 runs up to that point, in the second half we managed just 57. Lahiru Wijedasa (13 off 13 balls) and Sujay Iyer (16 off 11 balls) landed some lusty blows, but we lost as many wickets as we scored boundaries in this final phase of the game. This is where the toss had been so important: where earlier in the day the hard new ball had sped across the baking ground, the soft old ball started keeping low and certainly didn't fly in the same way. In the end the conditions weren't the deciding factor - if we'd bowled better we would have been chasing much less than 192 for victory - but it was a factor.
