Every year some rogue element in the Cambridge cricketing world decides to play silly buggers and organise a Friday evening match against Remnants. And every time it goes wrong, whether it be due to rain or the failure of one of the teams to get a side out. Today, at least, the weather was magnificent, and we did manage to field a reasonably good team against Fitzwilliam College, even if it was one man short of the conventional eleven.
Intrepid photo-journalist Dave Green reports that the year's pattern continued without any perceptible change: we fielded first and restricted yet another side to a 120-ish total. It's all to easy to just assume that we'll do this week in week out, but with only three regular bowlers in the side it was a tribute to Nick Clarke's canny management as much as anything else today. George Speller (1/14) made the first breakthrough before Dave Williams (2/14) and Remnants first-timer David Maund (1/8) took control towards the end of the innings.
So far, so good . . . but our repeated successes in the field have largely been undone by a season-long batting malaise, so victory was no forgone conclusion. Today though, Remnants (in Dave's words) ``at long last batted'', with John Gull (40 off 26 balls) and Dave Williams (20*) quickly putting us in an unasailable position with a 60-run opening stand off just 6 overs, scoring from ``some good hits, and the misses usually got runs too'' (again, according to our far-ranging correspondent and part-time astrophysicist).
We did have a bit of a stutter mid-innings, losing two wickets in two balls, but from then on it was the George Speller show. He smacked 48 not out off just 27 balls (thus ending John's half-hour residence at the top of the newly-conceived fastest innings leader board), hitting the winning runs with some 45 balls to spare.
The report from just a few weeks ago finished with a few whistful recollections wondering what happened to the Remnants team that could chase down sizeable totals with overs to spare -- could it be we're back in town?