Report by Daniel Mortlock:
Arriving at Fitz metaphorically - and perhaps in some cases literally - hung over from the night before, we were greeted by the sight of a bunch of fit-looking youngsters doing warm-up stretches on the square. The fear that there'd been a College double-booking was soon surplanted by the even scarier realisation that this was the Coton side we'd be taking on this evening - the oldest of them was younger than the most youthful of us.
And any remaining hopes that they mightn't be proper cricketers were soon dashed when their pace attack proved to a bit too sharp for our top order: Neil Grover (0 off 2 balls) was castled by a perfect in-swinger; Simon Godsill (14 off 39 balls) survived but struggled to score, at one point being 3* off 19 balls; and even JP Joubert found himself unusually tested, to the point where he was actually beaten once or twice. Our half-way score of 38/1 off 10 (six-ball) overs in one sense represented a successful negotation of some challenging new ball bowling - it would have been a points decision in our favour in a full-length league game - but in a twenyty/20 it unfortunately meant the game was probably already lost. Indeed, we were even in danger of setting such a low target that we'd struggled to give all the bowlers a spell in the second innings.
We did at least manage a decent acceleration as Tom Serby (24* off 31 balls) and Qaiser Ahmed (19* off 8 balls) gave good support to JP, who by this stage was motoring, making it seemingly inevitably to retirement, finishing with 40* off 33 balls. This took JP's 2024 record to an incredible 189 runs at, er, 189.00, the third highest season's batting average in club history, with top spot (Will Phelp's 267.00 in 2022) in his sights. Our final total of 111/3 was a considerable improvement on where we had been, and possibly even defendable if everything went our way.
Naveen Chouksey (1/9 in his 150th Remnants game) at least did his part, but neither Daniel Mortlock (0/20) nor Max Ayliffe (0/28) were able to stop T. Sandercock hoiking his way to 40* retired off 19 balls. It wasn't elegant, classical or even particularly controlled - but by the time he retired the score 47/1 after 5.1 overs; Coton needed just 65 from the remaining 89 deliveries, and whatever faint hopes we'd had were seemingly dashed.
While it would have been easy to give up at this point, we instead went into hustle mode, using the one clear advantage we had: experience. The first task was to take the pace off the ball, starting with a tactical shock over by John Moore (1/10) and then a more strategic squeeze by Faruk Kara (2/16, figures consistent with the overheard comment from one of the dismissed batters that "I had no idea how to play this guy!"). Next was to go with the form player, Qaiser, who sent down a blistering spell of 3/9 (taking his week's tally to 57 runs once dismissed and 4/10 from 5 overs, which would be the 15th best all-round effort if treated as a single performance). Backed up by some fantastic fielding by the likes of JP, Tom and Max, we restricted Coton to just 53 runs from overs 6-19 (inclusive), meaning we'd somehow taken the game to the final over with 8 runs still required. The chance for Remnants immortality fell to Rahul Jhawar (0/22):
Our effort in the last third of the game was fantastic comeback, and it's always great to be involved in a close game . . . if also frustrating that we came to this one so late.