Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Having only played NCI three times this season it was deemed necessary to organise a fourth fixture, which came in the form of a Sunday afternoon "post-season" game. (The quotes are required because it was clearly couldn't be an actual post-season game by definition - apparently paradoxes are the highest form of humour, above even fart jokes.) The day began with the seemingly inevitable WhatsApp vacillations following heavy overnight rain: "Pitch is damp but not underwater"; "Who's making the call and when?"; "Those playing be prepared for a sticky and skiddy pitch!"; "Sun's coming out. Blue sky visible. There's hope."; and, from an NCI player, "Should be ok but won't be a t20 run fest". This turned out to be a pretty solid prediction: we indeed played the full planned two-innings match without any interruptions (at least weather-related); but the overall scoring rate for the day was comfortably less than a run a ball.
Having called incorrectly at the toss ("eagle" rather than "strange geometrical form" - the coin was Mexican) we were, rather unsurprisingly, put into bat on a green and drying wicket. Sure enough, runs were initially all but impossible to come by: at the half-way point of our innings we were just 30/2. JP Joubert (16 off 19 balls) briefly scored pretty well, only to be bowled by an out-swinger delivered by NCI's German convert mere seconds after Cam (who plays for NCI in the league) noted that said bowler has "taken lots of wickets with the out-swinger he developed over the winter". Otherwise, it was all a bit dismal, with Simon Godsill (5 off 20 balls), Tom Serby (1 off 6 balls, before being run out after apparently having to dodge around a fielder) and Arad Sethia (9* off 23 balls at this point) competing for the non-existant dot-fest award. Fortunately, conditions got a bit easier and NCI ran out of bowlers (or perhaps took mercy on us?) and we managed a surprisingly explosive acceleration as Arad (49* off 52 balls) started to hit out and Cam Petrie (32* off 21 balls) went to town on his Saturday team-mates - as well as dominating the strike sufficiently to inadvertently deny Arad a first Remnants half-century, instead condemning him to jug avoidance.
105/3 didn't look too imposing an on the scoreboard, an impression that was reinforced as the NCI openers ticked off more than a third of our total at a run a ball. That said, this was against our fast - or at least fastest - bowlers and it was a different story when we slowed things down. Andy Owen (4/13) and Taha Ahsan (2/13 on Remnants debut) between them induced a collapse of 6/19 which completely destroyed NCI's ascendancy. The whole team picked up on the energy: 'keeper James Robinson took a catch and completed a stumping (which induced one last tantrum by the clearly-out batter, who'd previously complained only about non-wide calls, the pitch, and his partner's calling); Daniel took his seventh outfield catch of the season; JP fired in some extraordinary throws from the deep; and Simon and Andy made some great stops. In the end it was only after Marcus Baker (1/20) lost his vertical and horizontal hold - he was no-balled for landing the ball off the cut strip, a law (21.7) most of us didn't know - that NCI even made it close to parity.
Our second innings couldn't have been more different than our first, as our completely different top order (i.e., everyone who didn't get a bat first time around) raced past 30 mid-way through the 4th over rather than the 8th. This was primarily down to Marcus (50* retired off 32 balls), who batted like Parker's Piece was a road, whereas his opening partner, James (9 off 29 balls), got more and more frustrated as he seemed to get all the balls that popped, eventually calling for a helmet shortly before being dismissed. Neil Grover (7* off 19 balls), who's added the unwelcome "theatrical leave" to his already bulging repertoire of strokes, then had his innings euthanased when he "did his knee", resulting in a surprisingly intimate on-field massage and an early trip home. The rest of our middle order also struggled, as none of Taha (9 off 14 balls), Andy (1 off 3 balls) and Daniel (5* off 7 balls) were able to score at a run a ball.
We needed some sort of intervention, which we got - but rather than a deus ex machina it was a "dickheads from Manchester", two moronic Northern teenagers who decided they wanted to kick their football around on the ground. Rather than move on to some other part of the Piece they instead decided to show us both how "tough" they were, by kicking down the stumps safe in the knowledge that we weren't going to touch them, as tempting as it might have been to give them a slap. It was difficult not to feel some sympathy for such fundamentally ridiculous figures: the more vocal had coated his unusually spherical head in some sort of "product" that made him look like Draco Malfoy (if he had black hair); his largely non-verbal sidekick was a dead ringer for Dobby the house elf, with a crow-like beak and eyes that were somehow both bulging and blankly uncomprehending. Still, we couldn't play until they moved on, for which our only remaining strategy was to wait for them to get bored . . . although the vagaries of gender politics meant there were some more active options available to a female spectator who could only be described as feisty: she was, apparently, sufficiently annoyed by the break in play to march onto the field and take the two louts to task, inducing them to back up despite giving away a foot to both of them in height. Her parting line - "Suck my balls!" - was pretty appropriate, and sure enough that's effectively what they did, slouching off to start the rest of their likely dismal lives.
By this stage our full side of twelve had gotten a bat across the two innings, leaving the door open for JP to make a superb "cameo" second appearance: despite only coming in in the penultimate over, he clattered 27* off just 11 balls. A quickly scampered single off the final delivery of the innings appeared to have taken JP's season record to a neat 300 runs at 100.00, until the umpire, prompted by the bowler, belatedly (and correctly) signaled that it was a leg-bye, leaving JP with a Bradman-esque record of 299 runs at 99.67. Moreover, this late spurt of runs meant, in combination with our first innings surplus, we'd set NCI a target of 123 to win, so it felt like we were an hour away from a first ever single-season four-peat against a single club . . .
. . . a fantasy that was quickly revealed to be just that, as pretty much nothing went right for us in the final innings. Arad (1/16) did get an early wicket, courtesy of an LBW which the non-striker insisted pitched outside leg (which would have made it an appalling decision, given it was an off spinner to a right-hander), but from then we responded to our bad luck with a commensurate drop in bowling and fielding levels. The story was told in microcosm by NCI's surviving opener, R. Uddin, basically tried tried to smash everything, and mostly seemed to miss the ball altogether; and then, while playing plenty of good shots, also survived a ridiculous number of edges and mis-hits which all fell in the gaps (except for one spiralling edge which James got his hands to - it would have been the catch of the year if he'd held on). By the time Uddin had retired on 50* we were probably done, and by the time Joe White (1/29) took our second wicket the scores were already tied; the winning run was duly hit off the Joe's next delivery, with an over to spare.
A win would have been nice, but more important was to get out in the sun for one last time for 2024 - and to head off to The Elm Tree afterwards.