Our final 6pm start for the year saw us playing under dark and moody skies, with the match thus reduced to 13 eight-ball overs a side.
Right from the outset Wolfson College, who'd beaten us off the last ball earlier in the season, seemed to be a bit too good for us: their bowlers were too fast; they held difficult catches; and, it shouldn't surprise you, they had good batsmen too. John Gull (24 off 38 balls, possibly having found off-field inspiration) did well to survive the best of the bowling, eventually combining well with Ev Fox (26 off 27 balls) in the only significant partnership of the innings.
Indeed, scoring was sufficiently difficult that several batsmen resorted to trying to induce overthrows, shouting confusing calls of ``yesno'' from half-way up the pitch before sauntering through on a single (or, in one case, a four) after the inevitable wild throw. Despite such guerilla tactics, there wasn't much of an acceleration -- Chris Martin (15* off 18 balls) made a good late-innings contribution, but what we really needed was the sort of violent innings that John or Julius or Andy or, indeed, Chris, had played so often in previous matches. As it was we didn't even make it to triple figures -- 96/5 didn't seem very likely to be a winning total.
Although after the first over a come-from-behind victory seemed possible: Nev Fidler had taken a good catch off Les Collings (1/13) and Wolfson were 3/1. But then two of the better Wolfson batsmen combined for a fairly risk-free 86-run partnership. During this period we tried hard, but in vain: Sam Dolan, Dave Green and Chris Martin all put in excellent fielding performances, and Faruk Kara (0/13) and Chris (0/12) both bowled well . . . but the runs just kept coming. We did finally get a few wickets, Nick Clarke (1/19) and Daniel Mortlock (1/8) being the successful bowlers, but it was a case of too little too late.
So, a clean sweep for Wolfson against Remnants for 2004. And if that wasn't bad enough, Dave Norman was away so we didn't even get to have a post-match beer.