With our homeground apparently hijacked by the national women's cricket championship and Clare College's groundsman off sick, today's return match against Granta finally found a home at The Leys School's ground on distant Latham Road.
When we played Granta a few weeks ago we bowled first, took a wicket in the first over, and were then smashed all over the park by the opposition's star batsman as wickets fell around him. And that's just what happened today, although the batsman in question scored "just" 86 and we were left facing a target of "just" 157.
The innings was actually strangely homogeneous: the run- and wicket-rate stayed about the same for the whole innings and our attack consisted entirely of slow bowlers, most of whom got wickets and all of whom conceded a little more than 6 runs an over. The most successful were Russell Woolf (2/18) and Phil Watson (3/19), but it was Martin Law (1/24) who got the wicket that mattered, catching a cracking straight drive off his own bowling (and even giving rather pointed directions to the pavilion as he let out a primeval howl of triumph). Martin really should have had two wickets (and Ev Fox a hat-trick of stumpings) but somehow a stumping so blatant that the batsman had started to walk was missed by the vaguest of umpires (whose catch-phrase, "one left?" was generally uttered after the third ball of each over).
There was a lot of chasing needed in the field but, a few good boundary-line catches aside, it was a pretty poor performance. The batsmen were able to turn ones into twos and twos into threes throughout the innings, and only Nick Clarke at short cover and Rich Savage on the long boundary really distinguished themselves.
It also fell to these two to lead off a rather daunting run chase, but all was going well until Rich broke the club's one decent bat. He thus gave himself the perfect excuse for being bowled next ball, an event which precipitated a collapse that only stopped with score at a rather inelegant 77/6. Of the top order only Nick (36) and Rob Harvey (19) made it into double figures but no-one went close to scoring at the required rate.
By the time Martin Law (31*) and Faruk Kara (20) came together there was only pride to play for, and they salvaged a large amount of this valuable commodity with some stylish batting. Their partnership of 42 was far better than any other in our innings, although they did seem to develop some sort of death-wish in the last few overs: when a succession of big aerial shots were dropped they decided to start attempting silly runs off misfields, with the inevitable run out coming with just four balls to go.
Our eventual total of 120/7 wasn't too shabby, but once again we were thrashed. And once again it was largely due the efforts of a single Granta batsman, although this time he was just very good, rather than obviously too good. Moreover, the entire Granta team played the match in a fun spirit, and fun spirits were in plentiful supply at Clare College's nifty marquee, the unusual venue for the post-match imbiberisationarisms.