For this afternoon's rematch with UCLES we found ourselves back on the unfamiliar Fitzwilliam turf -- our first home game since July 9. The day couldn't make up its mind what it wanted to do, and we began our innings in a warm afternoon glow, only to finish with a few spots of rain on our glasses (which most of the team wear).
We batted first, and our innings was a pretty patchy affair. John Gull sprang out of the blocks with a fantastic 28 (off 19 balls), continuing his superb late-season form, and then Nick Clarke picked up where John had left off, smashing an even more spectacular 46 off a mere 29 balls. One UCLES bowler saw his first two deliveries pulled onto the pavilion roof, and was promptly removed from the attack with the miserable figures of 0/26 off one over. Nick and John Young (16) took the score on from 49/4 to 101, but a fantastic diving catch at square leg not only prevented Nick getting the season's fastest half-century, but also halted our innings in its tracks.
The last few overs saw plenty of wickets fall and very few runs, at least until Robin Woolley came to the crease in the final over -- he scored 19* off just 6 balls, ensuring that our total was at least something of a challenge.
Or so we had hoped -- the UCLES innings began with a boundary that just eluded the fielder's despairing lunge, and most of the next hour's play followed this frustrating pattern. Daniel Mortlock (3/22, the one earned wicket being down to a superb first-ever stumping by Mike Scanlon) and Mike Jones (0/18) looked to have given us some hope with the score at 27/3 in the fifth over, but from then on it was one-way traffic.
With the exception of John Gull's running and diving on the boundary and the unperturable Les Collings, none of us fielded with any great aplomb, and the misfields, overthrows and dropped catches prevented us from ever getting into the match. The seemingly endless supply of lofted shots just out of reach didn't help matters either, and all of us bowlers supplied a goodly number of half-trackers for the UCLES batsmen to hit away with the minimum of fuss.
It was frustrating for all of us in the field, but spare a particular thought for Paul Jordan (1/33), who could only stand with hands on unconventionally black-clad hips and shake his head in frustration as UCLES's best batsman, having been dropped off two consecutive deliveries, sent the final ball of Paul's over sailing just over the boundary fielder's head for a six. This is also how the game finished: the last ball of the penultimate over was the game's eighth ``maximum'' (as the Channel 4 commentators now insist on referring to sixes), breaking yet more of the poor pavilion's roof tiles.
Six is also, sadly, the number of consecutive losses Remnants has suffered in its recent horror run. The only thing for it was a drink and some serious contemplation of cancelling the rest of the season's external fixtures in favour of a succession of Remnants vs. Remnants games. This creative solution to the problem at hand was, boringly, discarded once it was realised that we'd lose fifty per cent of the internal matches too.
The story of today's rather forgetable match probably should have ended there, but some five years later one of the opposition players, R Lindsell, set up an UCLES cricket blog, Flannels And Dusters, and has been revisiting some Cambridge cricketing history. Included in this most amusing series of snap-shots is a lengthy and colourful description of today's match. Whilst the the two reports don't really contradict each other, they were, apparently, written from two such different perspectives that it's not even obvious they're describing the same game. About the only definitive markers are the two UCLES star moments: the great catch (which can now be attributed to a Mr Danson) and the match-ending sixes. However it also reveals a few other interesting tid-bits: they thought we were overly-generous in not calling some of their bowlers for more wides; and they thought one of our batsmen had a "bizarre" helmet. So that leaves a mystery: which one of us batted in "fancy dress"? Maybe in another five years we'll find out.