Paul Jordan followed up his achievement of grabbing two-thirds of the wickets taken by Remnants this week by penning this report:
Our mini-exile continued as we went even further afield than Cambridge, and headed for the wilds of Abington. On arriving I was greeted by the site of a number of middle-aged men all in the process of undressing in close proximity to several junior executive vehicles and in one case a motor bike. The changing rooms were unavailable so the car park was our changing area.
Their skipper was adamant that we should go for 20 six-ball overs and having won the toss, put in place my cunning plan: to amass a large total and let them struggle in the dark with Naveen and Jeff at full tilt. Well this kind of worked in so much that the winning of the toss bit went to plan. Sadly the rest of it went awry. This was without doubt a poor batting performance on our part. Nobody really got going in the top order. Richard Rex (33* off 33 balls) and Tom Collett (26 off 31 balls), along with Nick Johnson (19 off 13 balls), managed to bat with a bit of purpose and from a pretty meagre looking score at one point we managed an almost-respectable 120. Experience dictates that 140+ is what you need and even that can be chased down these days.
It's worth pointing out that we did feel some sense of grievance, as the application of wides was at best applied with a very liberal interpretation; Richard Rex doing a very passable impression of Elastigirl from The Incredibles and whilst falling over at full stretch elicited a dot ball! In the absence of DRS we deferred to Geoff and he felt two of the L.B.W. decisions were questionable too.
We certainly didn't bat at our best and what followed confirmed that with some judicious big hits on the shorter boundary we had missed a trick. The Philanderers' openers were a competent pair who hit anything short well and were clean strikers of decent full length balls too. Naveen Chouksey (0/11) was the pick of our bowlers and one wonders had Jeff Beaumont been fit to bowl what impact he would have made. Alec Armstrong (0/29) and Paul Jordan (1/23) bowled reasonably well, Paul taking the only wicket, the big hitter who previously scored so effectively against us for Burrough Green last year. Our fieding held up pretty well, with Ferdi Rex patrolling the leg-side boundary and Rob Harvey and Nick Johnson doing sterling work at long-off and deep extra-cover. Our bowling lacked consistency and the fact that the opposition reached the total in the 15th over came as no surprise.
We were out-batted and out-bowled, but as always we gave our best which is commendable and another day is another day.