Report by Daniel Mortlock:
The supply of outrageous good fortune which graced some of our early season matches, and which lasted far longer than expected, finally and decisively ran out this evening. What was initially scheduled as a likely well-balanced game against Cambridge Assessment vanished into the dreaded "TBA" on the fixture list as they had to play a rescheduled league match. The usual desperate plea to the WhatsApp group was this time answered by the St Giles contingent, who hastily assembled a team of "thirds and fourths players" who we might have been able to compete against . . . but for the fact that their side included a goodly portion of our better batters: Chris Badger, Martin Heginbotham, Seb Hammersley, CJ Barrie and Pete Ames have between them scored 3785 runs at 29.80 for Remnants, but were all playing for St Giles this evening.
Not that our personnel problems ended there, as we'd been losing players at a rate of about one a day since the weekend, with work, illness and the seemingly irresistable lure of playing for the Cambs Over 50s all taking their toll. With this anarchic lead-up to the match it was more important than ever that the captain lead by example, which Daniel Mortlock did by arriving sufficiently late that the rest of the side was in position in the field - we'd sensibly agreed to let St Giles bat first - while he was getting changed and making an emergency bathroom visit. Daniel's attempts to confidently take charge of the Remnants eleven were rather deflated by the realisation that it was actually a ten: Neil hadn't realised he'd been selected and so was sitting around at home. It was too late to helicopter him in, so St Giles agreed to lend us a playing sub, Chris Badger being unsurprisingly keen to bat for both sides. (Settle down.)
When the game finally got underway we intially matched it with St Giles . . . for seven deliveries. Naveen Chouksey (1/17 and, as so often this season, the pick of the bowlers) conceded just four runs from his first over and Rahul Jhawar (0/22) started with a dot ball; but after that it was the CJ Barrie show as he pulled and hooked his way to 35* (off 17 balls) in his first innings of the season. By the time he retired after the first ball of the 9th over St Giles were 76/1 and it was already near-certain that they'd finish with an unassailable total. Other than Naveen, Daniel (1/16, along with two solid catches) was the only other bowler to go for less than 7 an over, although even that included the indignity of being deposited way over the high netting by Martin Heginbotham (34* off 26 balls). The dominance of St Giles's Remnants contingent over our bowlers was not total, however, as Faruk Kara (1/30) bamboozled Chris Badger (16 off 15 balls), successfully inducing a top edge that presented 'keeper Andy Owen with possibly the easiest catch he's ever taken. In the end St Giles ended up with an imposing total of 161/4, fully 40 runs more than any other team has scored against us this season - even it was mainly us doing the scoring, the Remnants contingent joinly scoring 85 off 59 balls for once out. Conversely, our bowlers' figures made for predictably sorry reading - almost as much as their names, which were surprisingly (given the number of Remnants in the batting side) mangled, as "Nuveen", "Jawhar", "Simmonds" and "Mortslak" all made suprise appearances.
Any tiny hopes we had of chasing down St Giles's total were put to rest quickly as we collapsed to be 17/4 in the 6th over. Super-sub Chris Badger, now batting for us, at least arrested the slide with a controlled inning of 17 (off 29 balls) after which Andy Owen (13* off 33 balls) and Naveen Chouksey (13* off 22 balls) at least ensured we batted out our full 20 overs.
In the end about the only thing that went right for us in this match was that it went ahead - so on that score it was the highlight of week given a surpise wash-out the following evening.