Presumably responding to alarmingly short evenings we're now being subject to, the County Council organiser sent out a helpful e-mail this afternoon asking "Should we try and aim for a 5:45 start tomorrow do you think?" All very sensible, with the exception of one terrifying word: tomorrow.
A quick phonecall established that this wasn't a typo: they thought we were playing on Wednesday; we had them booked in for today. With only a few hours before match time there was no chance of organising alternative opposition, so a potentially anodyne double-wicket competition was the best option, an especially frustrating state of affairs late in the season like this, when good cricket evenings are so precious.
It's tempting to just leave it as "one of those things"; but, while not quite worthy of a parliamentary enquiry, it did seem worth at least trying to work out what went wrong. Going through old e-mails from way back in January reveals the following exchange (with the organisations rather than the people's names given not to protect the innocent but because both club organisers are called Daniel):
Which is where the first mistake was made: they didn't confirm that last message and there was no follow-up e-mail requesting confirmation. So it seems that this last message might never have been read, leaving a ticking time-bomb with an eight-month fuse.
Still, there was actually a pretty decent chance that this would be spotted when the pre-match confirmation e-mail went out the week before. But, as luck would have it, i) they got to sending this first, asking "Just checking you guys are still on for cricket next Wednesday?", but ii) the e-mail arrived in the middle of last week's shambles and so in the rush of heading to cricket (and trying to convince builders to repair the hole they'd put in the neighbour's ceiling), that critical word wasn't spotted. And, from then, the bomb was fated to go off. The e-mail mentioned at the top of the report at least meant that everyone knew what was going on - and that the County Council didn't descend on Fitz the the next night, although from the point of view of the evening's Remnants eleven all this probably didn't make much difference.