Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Drama! Excitement! Assassination attempts! Money-laundering! Today's game had it all.
The first blow was struck before a ball was bowled, Faruk Kara making a last-minute withdrawl from today's game with food-poisoning. It is of course possible that it was just an innocent curry-gone-wrong, but the fact that he was last year's star batsman (averaging a Tendulkaresque 57.00) makes it seem more than likely that The Globe's hard men got to him (or the restaurant in which he dined last night). The sudden need for a replacement led calm-in-a-crisis Geoff Hales to Tony Malik's door, and so the erstwhile Remnants captain was called up for his first match of the season, although only after he'd paid both this year's and last year's subs in cold hard cash of dubious origin.
There's no way the game itself could compare to these off-field machinations, and indeed it was a slow-moving and low-scoring affair.
Remnants batted first but lost wickets regularly, the only batsmen to get beyond 15 being Nick Clarke (30) and his Geezerness, Prof. Malik (20 - close, but no banana). With those two together we reached a respectable 69/1, but ended up with a rather mediocre 111/5.
The Globe got away to a decent start, scoring at the required rate for the first third of their innings despite Rupert Brown (1/6) carrying on where he'd left off last year (i.e. he'd topped the bowling averages). His wicket was also something special, with Colin Anderson ``leaping ten feet in the air'' (according to unreliable witnesses) to pull down a spectacular catch. These efforts notwithstanding, it was in the middle stanza of The Globe's innings that we won the game, with Russell Woolf (2/15 and early favourite to head the bowling averages) and a certain Mr Malik (an unlucky 0/14) robbing the batsmen of any momentum they may have had and, most importantly, dealing with the ever-present threat of a quick-fire half century from our nemesis, Mick Taylor. Things got a bit looser as the mist drew in and the pints went down, but in the end we won comfortably, with The Globe failing even to break the century.