Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Taking on a new opponent always incurs the risk of a mismatch, leading to hopes of a comfortable win over the aging schoolmasters from the King's School in Ely. But, rather than arriving at Fitz to find some doddery old Latin teachers hobbling about, the ground was overrun by fit-looking guys in their twenties doing drills in their matching navy kit. Our last ray of hope was the fact that their shirts all had the enigmatic 'ENZYMES' acros the back - perhaps this was some other cricket club that had arrived at Fitz by mistake - but it was soon explained that this was just the quirky name that the school had adopted for its staff and alumni team - and it was just random chance that most of their side today were ex-first team players who'd been robbed of games during the pandemic. With that cleared up the result was entirely predictable . . .
. . . even if it began with a solid half-century opening partnership between Seb Hammersley (12 off 19 balls) and CJ Barrie (44* retired off 33 balls). So we at least weren't blown away - and CJ's innings included the two biggest shots of the day, pulling balls into both Dave's back garden and just missing the greenhouse on the far side of the ground. Fun as that was, though, the hard truth was that the Enzymes had us under control - our run rate didn't get above a run a ball until the 16th over. Nominal bowlers Matthew Doel (27* off 26 balls), Joe White (19 off 18 balls) and Ben Stone (6* off 6 balls) did manage a final acceleration, but we never got the monster over we needed, and our final total of 130/3 seemed far from daunting.
Certainly the Enzymes' top order weren't intimidated by our new ball (well, old ball - we were on our third for the day) attack: Daniel Mortlock (0/23) was greeted with a sequence of ramp shots; and Naveen Chouksey (0/19) had his first ball somehow accelerated over fine leg's head for an enormous six. These dismissive shots were all by one H. Palmer who, rumour had it, "is on YouTube pulling Stuart Broad off his nose" (although vigorous Google searching has not revealed the relevant footage).
Given the batters' comfort with conventional medium pace, the obvious option was to go as far from this as possible, so John Moore was brought on in the third over in the hope that these coached players simply wouldn't know what to do with his moon balls. And so it turned out: both openers top-edged attempted pulls and should have been caught; and, even having thus survived, the similar cross-bat shots they did connect with were repeatedly stopped by Ben and CJ on the pavilion boundary. After two overs John had resepectable figures of 0/12 (and should have had 2/10) . . . at which point we went to the well once too often - the batters had worked out an alternative strategy of coming down the track to him, and he ended up with decidedly unfair figures of 0/46.
From there we were kind of done, as the Enzymes batters came and went in a sequence of retirements, the one exception being when Max Ayliffe (1/30) took our only genuine wicket. (Daniel and 'keeper Seb Hammersley combined for a nice run out, but that was only a possibility because the batters opted to go for a silly second run.) The game ended - or, rather, didn't - in rather farcical scenes, as we were sure that the winning runs had been hit, only for two new Enzymes to come out with the surprise information that 10 runs were still needed. Subsequent examination of the scorebook revealed that the match was already over - although it was also clear that the Enzymes' scorer had taken the same casual approach as their batters, and it was more of an impressionistic piece than an accurate record of the innings.
Overall a rather humbling experience - but hopefully we'll get the chance to do better next year.