Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Confucius say "when opponents' worst bowling figures are 3/19, opponent has won." Or at least he would have said that had he not lived two millennia before the invention of cricket; and he certainly would have been right. Because, while this is nominally a Remnants match report, the only story worth telling is that of the Fen Ditton bowlers: "Krish" took 3/3 from his 2 (eight-ball) overs before harshly being taken off; J. Reid was (comparatively) tonked for the aforementioned 3/19 off his 2 overs; "Fez" then replaced "Krish" and took 3/10 off a full-length 3-over spell; and then, after all this nippy seam-up bowling, we got the reductio ad absurdum of a purveyor of ultra-slow lobs who sent down 21 deliveries before conceding a run and finished up bonkers figures of 2.7 overs, 2 maidens, 2/1. So the combined Fen Ditton bowling figures were 9.7 overs, 3 maidens, 11/33 . . .
. . . which reveals the other highly embarrassing aspect of our evening's efforts, which was that for the second time in a fortnight we ended up selecting a twelve rather than an eleven. One might be tempted to blame the club secretary, but given that he's writing this report it's clear that the real problem was a flurry of late drop-outs and substitutions. Whatever, it meant that once again we were subbing people off every over, giving our whole time in the field a slightly disorganised feel to it.
Still, our efforts with the ball, while obviously not reaching the levels obtained by our opponents, were pretty reasonable. Ben Stone (0/13) started with another superb spell of outswing that beat the bat more often then not (although we only had the three slips in place today); Daniel Mortlock (2/20) upped his season's tally of "bowled"s to 7, primarily due to some low bounces that were a portent of things to come; Alec Armstrong (0/6) offered up a combination of flight and guile that the batsmen simply could't deal with (and would of course have gotten a third over but for the ultra-abbreviated format); Naveen Chouksey (1/13) started his spell with a wicket maiden; and first-timer Claude Warnick (1/17) got his first Remnants wicket with a sharp return catch off the third last ball of the innings. We also fielded pretty well, the star being Ben Jakes, who got both a run out and a catch in his first Remnants game, while Julius Rix, Huw Davies (our third first-timer) and John Young also made lots of good stops. Not that such efforts are so relevant when the batsmen manage to smash the ball into neighbouring gardens: while Fen Ditton's total of 117 didn't seem so daunting, it did include 5 sixes . . .
. . . which between them constituted just 1 run less than scored by our dozen batsmen. Nobody could really hold their head that high, although some mention must be made of Huw Davies (5 off 11 balls) and Matt Samson (13), who did, er, less worse than everyone else.
Perhaps the worst thing of all was that Dave was off playing for the Cambridgeshire Over 40's team, which meant that we couldn't even drown our sorrows at the bar.