Today was glorious, the sun beating down on Cambridge with an almost Australian intensity, although with the wonderful freshness of cool green foliage that is covering the city at the moment. Could there be any better setting for a post-work game of cricket? In short, yes. To be more explicit, anywhere where a game of cricket was played was, by definition, superior. For today's match against Wolfson College was called off before some of us had even gotten out of bed. Cruelly, the joy of sleepily pulling the curtains aside to reveal a blue sky was almost exactly matched by the phone message from a rather glum-sounding Goeff, who'd called at the most un-Geoff-like hour of 8am, to say ``Tonight's game's already off. We'll try again next week.''
Yeah, but we said that last week as well, and look what happened! So that's a record five cancellations in a row now, a run that was started when The Philanderers failed to raise a team and then continued by a near ceaseless deluge of summer rain. We're already a third of the way through our ``season'' and we've hardly done anything: nobody's played more than four matches; nobody's made a hundred runs; nobody's taken more than five wickets; nobody's taken more than more than one catch -- many of us have managed to better at least one of those marks in a single match. Next time we do get to play it'll feel like a first warm-up game all over again.
Although maybe that won't be such a bad thing, 'cos we've struggled a bit this year, managing just the two narrow runs victories, whilst generally failing to stop the opposition scoring. So far we've conceded totals of 130/8, 147/8, 140/5, 130/1 and 146/4 (with about ten balls remaining in the last two cases), whereas last year it was a rarity for anyone to get more than a run a ball against us. It's kind of weird, given that we've got pretty much the same line-up, but there you have it. Even weirder is that the batting has, after a couple of slow-scoring seasons, gotten a bit more lively -- only once have we made less than 120, and that was at due to some good fast bowling as much as slow batting.
More importantly, let's just hope that we get back on the field sometime soon, and that this little summary of this most un-summery of seasons so far doesn't turn out to be the end-of-season report.