The 2001 season finished on something of a sour note for Remnants with the University's physics department, The Cavendish Laboratory, thrashing us by 9 wickets. Such a defeat is never fun at the best of times, but, given that a number of Remnants work at The Cavendish, it was particularly frustrating. Hence we congregated at Fitzwilliam keen to avenge last year's defeat and show the nerds a thing or two about playing cricket.
For the first few overs of our innings we did, scoring at more than a run per ball, largely through Dave Williams (20) using his late cut to great effect, although extras (31) also played well. The Cavendish then pegged us back, their bowlers finding a difficult length, and we didn't get to 50 until the twelfth over. Tony Malik (27) hung on through this stage of the innings and then scored rapidly enough to see us past the century, but I think everyone felt we needed 140-odd rather than the 102 we eventually got.
There was no way we were going to be able to defend our total by just containing The Cavendish batsmen, and so we set out to get lots of quick wickets. What in fact happened was that the batsmen got lots of quick runs. George Speller (1/38) bowled well, and was sharp enough to rush the batsmen on occasion, but it was Daniel Mortlock who did the real damage, conceding a mere 38 runs off his three overs, sometimes restricting the batsmen to just a single. Having thus reached 78/1 off 7 overs a Cavendish victory was beyond doubt, but it seemed that they were attempting to get the runs in under ten overs. Fortunately for our egos the remaining opener retired (with a seemingly effortless half century off about 30 balls) and the rest of the game was played at a more sedate pace. Rupert Brown (1/8) and Tony Malik (0/9) bowled with the sort of discipline that may have been enough to stem the earlier scoring, but a steady flow of nudged singles was enough to see The Cavendish home in the fourteenth over. However one bright spot in all this gloom was Phil Marshall's debut as wicket keeper -- a few byes got through down the leg-side, but otherwise he did tidy work (not that the ball got past the batsmen that often) and should be able to fill this role with confidence in the future.