Sunday 12 May 2024
Avorians 116 all out (26.3 overs)
SCCC 118 for 4 (27.4 overs)
SCCC won by 6 wickets
40 over match
Avorians won the toss
Scorecard
Roland Jordan writes:
So two weeks later than planned, The Cryptics season finally got underway at the Avorians. Bridges was so keen to get started that he arrived around 9.00am and Scotty for some reason decided to turn up half way through the Avorians innings, having thought that the match started at 2pm.
As the players assembled in the glorious sunshine, chat typically turned to everyone’s various “old man” injuries, with various complaints of bad backs, knees and elbows, either picked up over the Winter break or just got worse since the end of last season. If only we knew a decent physiotherapist who could help.
Talking of which, Gossy decided to put let the Avorians bat first, with us to field, and with himself and Daddy G opening the bowling. Whilst Gossy took a while to warm up, Daddy G was out of the trap like a whippet and bowled their opener in his first over with a beauty. The second and third wickets were quickly hoovered up by Gossy, with two catches, one taken by Ed Grinders in mid wicket and the other a lovely caught and bowled, which was followed with a “mic drop” reaction.
With the hosts tottering on 27 for 3, a change of bowling was required to try and stretch the game out so Paul Bridges was bought into the line up, followed shortly afterwards by Ed Grinders. What Gossy didn’t remember is that Paul Bridges is now known as “Warney”, and for good reason, bookending his 5 overs with 2 wickets. One a horrible (to face) loopy ball that yorked the batsman and one caught at point by Roland (his first catch for the club).
Ed Grinders bowled well, as usual, and took another wicket.
It would be remiss of me not to mention that both Ed and Warney should have had another 3 wickets between them with missed catches (Scotty – dropped catch, Dom – told to move by Goss and then the ball went to where he had been standing, and best of all Hugs – running forward to catch the ball only for it to sail just out of reach above him).
A further change of bowling with Lucas and Dom was introduced, to try to avoid this from being embarrassing, but they didn’t read the memo either. Lucas taking his first Cryptics wicket in his 4 overs and Dom taking 2 wickets in his 3, all of which were cleaned bowled.
Quite suddenly, the Avorians were on 111-9, and the end of their innings all revolved around Daddy G. First he took a catch at square leg to end the match (and would have been a golden duck for the batsman), before it was decided that it was a no ball and the batsman should have another go. Then 2 overs later, he was brought back on to bowl and took the final wicket, and the Avorians were all out for 116 in 26.3 overs.
So with a fairly short innings, match teas were not ready and the Cryptics were sent into bat.
Richard and Lucas were sent in at the top of the order, and started chipping away at the score, until Richard decided to give out some catching practice to gully. He got away with it, as a no ball was given, but as we will know, when Richard is determined to do something, he will do it, and the very next ball was caught at point on 6.
Roland followed and with tea approaching, he and Lucas agreed to take it easy – we only needed 3 an over to win after all – and make it to tea, which we did, and is probably something that neither of us will ever achieve again in our cricketing careers!
With everyone fed and watered we wandered back out in the square. Lucas got fed up with the low scoring a promptly got caught with a lovely forward drive that didn’t quite get hit hard enough to make over the head of mid off on 9.
That bought Hugs in who prodded away with Roland until he too “went for a big one” and was bowled on 8.
Next up was Dom, and it might be worth pointing out that Paul was umpiring at this point. Paul had either a) forgotten that he needed to be somewhere urgently or b) was just bored of the Geoffrey Boycott style of batting, so gave Roland out LBW when the square leg umpire even saw it hitting his bat, whatever the reason, the decision was actually inspired.
This teamed up Dom and Scotty who firstly scored the first boundary of our innings (after 20.1 overs) and secondly between them put on 73 runs (Dom 39 and Scotty 34), despite Scotty doing his best to take Ricky home with him and being dropped on 0.
So having been 48 for 3 after 20 overs, they wrapped up the match in the next 7.4 overs, and an early beer for all.