Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Eleven is a small number to everyone except people who organise cricket teams (the new more inclusive term that the ICEC report recommends be used in place of "secretary"). Certainly it was a quantity which seemed out of reach to both us and the Woozlers today: they were down to ten; we provided them with our twelfth, Simon Godsill; then one of their original ten was stuck dealing with what was described worryingly as "a police incident"; then twelve of our players turned up, Chris Badger being the only person who believed he was in the team. Still, even if the regular substitutions and rotations were confusing, the main thing is there were enough people at the ground to get a game on - and to have endless circular discussions about "Bairstowgate" and the elusive "spirit of cricket".
We won the toss and elected to bat, which went well for Temoor Khan (41* retired off 37 balls) but less well for Chris Badger (9 off 23 balls), who seemed unable to time his shots, despite using a super-bat that Ben Stone had acquired from his brother Olly. With Tom Serby (5 off 11 balls) also struggling to score, we had a potentially fatal mid-innings lull, featuring some rather un-enterprising running, after which we were just 76/2 after 11 of 15 (eight-ball overs). So even though James Robinson (20* off 22 balls) and Marcus Baker (34 off 26 balls, before giving himself out LBW in the manner of someone walking after they've nicked it) smashed 49 runs off the last 4 overs, our final total of 125/4 was no more than middling.
Still, our defense started brilliantly as Naveen Chouksey (0/11) and Joe White (1/15) seemed to be all but impossible to score off. After 3 overs the Woozlers' total was a a scarcely believable 4/1, meaning that some instant scoreboard pressure that (perhaps) induced Simon to take a risky single that was punished by Daniel Mortlock's direct hit run out. Daniel, Tom, Dian Weerakonda and John Moore made some fantastic close-in stops to keep the pressure on, although the ball was starting to puncture our ring more than we would have liked. (Settle down.) Where we had a mid-innings lull, the Woozlers had a mid-innings surge, and by the half-way point they were probably ahead on WinViz.
There was a brief moment of hope when Faruk Kara (2/16) took two wickets in his first over, and then Pete Ames (1/19) also struck in his first over when 'keeper Marcus Baker took a superb wide catch. Unfortunately, it was also during this over that the match (literally) slipped from our grasp, as two lofted pulls that could easily have resulted in catches, went to the boundary as the fielders were blinded by the near-horizontal sun. Indeed, it's possible we would have still been in the match if the cloudy conditions in which it started had persisted through to the end . . . whereas we instead had to endure yet another defeat at the hands of The Woozlers.