Report by Julius Rix:
With dry weather forecast and as usual a beautiful pitch prepared you might have thought that Remnants would easily field a full team; however as 6pm rolled around a jet-lagged but spritely looking Dave Green was drafted in as eleventh man, having just returned from India. Remnants Captain Joe White surprisingly turned up just before 6 and, having lost the toss, we found we were batting.
We opened with Tom Serby and Karti Malik (no relation to Tony) and there were high hopes that Tom would have a repeat of his superb 68* from last week. However, some tight bowling from the Woozlers openers kept them both in check, especially their second bowler Ahmed who was swinging it around accurately. It wasn't long before Tom was heading back having scored 7 (off 10 balls) after playing on to Ahmed. This brought Julius Rix to the crease, who took a while to settle down. Unfortunately Karti (11 off 17 balls) was bowled by a lovely ball (again from Ahmed) a couple of overs later. This brought Dave Norman in, who tonight was batting on a tight schedule as he had to taxi his daughter around town. If anything, this meant that he didn't hang around and quickly started to score boundaries. Julius had also found his feet, swinging hard and scored 30 before being bowled by a straight one from Grimshaw, The Woozlers' captain. Dave continued to score supported by Shoib and Eli Elwood until he retired (on 67* off 35 balls) to carry out the aforementioned taxi service. By this stage we looked like we had a defendable score with the only hiccup Eli taking a massive swipe on the penultimate ball which bowled him, bringing John Young in for the last ball. Still 148 seemed good enough off 15 eight-ball overs, even though we knew that the Woozlers had a strong batting line-up.
The Woozlers innings started solidly, but slowly, with only 27 scored off the first 4 overs, Joe White (0/10) and Eli Ellwood (1/27) both bowling tightly. Unfortunately, from that point on they [sadly The Woozlers, not our bowlers - ed.] accelerated, especially after Eli trapped their opening batsmen LBW. Alec Armstrong (1/45) and Faruk Kara (0/25) were both finding it tough to find a way through the left-handers. Alec finally bowled their number three in his final over and if we could just slow them down a bit we might just squeeze a win. Unfortunately, a loose over from Julius for 21 really put them firmly in the lead, and there was only so much that Faruk and Dave Norman (0/6) could do. The ball was thrown to Karti Malik (0/9) with cries of, "You'll have to do better than a Mortlock!" for the 14th over with the Woozlers needing 7 to win. They passed the target with a well struck 4 off the last ball of the over.
In the end they were too strong for us. We'll have to get better before our next meeting with them in July.