Tom Serby fulfilled dual duties as weatherman and reporter today:
There was cricket at Fitzwilliam for the first time in 10 days, but first the all important weather report, the topic that has dominated the season so far. We had rain during the day which made for a very slow outfield; a healthy proportion of the boundary hits were sixes, fours being extremely hard to come by as the ball died in the outfield (getting in my excuses early regarding the upcoming report on my individual innings). There was a heavy shower in between innings, and after a couple of sorties with the covers someone remarked that as soon as we put them on it stopped raining, unfortunately the obvious corollary also applied; eventually we got a second innings, with the outfield even slower (more excuses, Remnants batted second). Immediately after the match there was a dramatic thunderstorm with simultaneous thunder and lightning.
Little Paxton's openers set about our bowling from the outset, this despite Olly Rex's (1/32) strategem of mixing it up with an assortment of medium paced left arm and slow right arm bowling in the space of one over. Olly conserved his energies for batting and Faruk Kara (1/24) replaced him in the fourth over, from the Winsor Road end, containing for the most, but paying a heavy price for some short balls. At the Huntingdon Road end Naveen Chouksey (1/8) was largely on target and got the batsmen playing and missing as well producing some fine diving stops from the diminuitive keeper, Samuel Serby. Bowlers Paul Jordan (0/29), Mihir Chandrekar (0/28) and Tom Serby (0/24) collectively bore the brunt of the scoring surge in the second half of the Paxton innings from a batsman known only to Remnants by his teammates' soubriquet Sumo, which accurately describes both his body mass index and his batting style. By the end of his innings four fielders were on the boundary between long on and midwicket, all powerless to do anything to stop the sixes over their heads. Mihir, with his skilful mix of legbreaks and googlies, looked most like getting him with several swipes missing the ball by a distance; but "Sumo" eventually perished in the final over when Olly Rex (bowling spin now) lured him out of his ground and a smart stumping was completed by Samuel. The relative carnage resulted all told in a target of 146 for Remnants to chase.
Openers Tom Serby (35 off 44 balls) and Faruk Kara (20 off 34 balls) were hampered in their efforts to accelerate the scoring by a series of double bouncing wide balls outside off from Paxton's young opener, Will, whose constant berating from behind the stumps by his wicket keeping father was a curious piece of familial sledging, a somewhat surprising form of mental disintegration aimed at one's own offspring. After Faruk's departure for, Olly Rex (39* off 32 balls) joined Tom Serby (35 of 44 balls), who was now timing the ball well but picking out deep fielders. With only 45 runs on the board from our first 10 (six-ball) overs we were all but lost - scoring at 10 an over seemed pretty unlikely. Naveen Chouksey (14* off 12 balls, with some neat flicks and smart running) and Olly (with big backswing and bigger swing of the shoulders) combined for a final 4-over flourish which meant we got to a creditable 128/2 - not a bad score at all given the conditions.
So a defeat, but we were happy to just get a game in.
