Wrist Spin Bowling: First Match of the season B&PCC v Eversley CC (Friendly)

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Bad weather threatened to scupper this match and the fact that Liverpool and Chelsea were playing soccer somewhere and people might be likely to be watching that event. As it turned out the weather held off and the game ended in drizzle for the last half an hour just before it rained proper as we walked off the field.

The team consisted of the following less the new bloke Gopal Viswanathan, Sonny Downes and Daniel Vanderputt.

	Jack Farrington
2	Gopal Viswanathan
3	Jamie Britton
4	Daniel Vanderputt
5	Harrison Birch
6	Sonny Downes
7	Thomas Hardy
8	Frank McLeod
9	Mitchell McLeod
10	Dave Thompson
11	Ben Thompson

We were only able to get 10 players out with one of the three letting us down at the last moment which was a shame as if there'd been a little more notice my other younger son Joe could have played.

We bowled first - don't know what the outcome of the toss was and it went okay. They had a couple of good players who threatened to take the game away from us but their wickets fell quite cheaply. Unfortunately the score book wasn't filled in that well and the score-board wasn't kept up to-date for much of the match, but we managed to bowl them out about 3 overs short of the allocated 40. I bowled 4 overs as I recall, with one maiden and based on the info that was in the score book it looks as though I went for 14 runs and took two wickets. One edge caught by the wicket keeper Jamie and the other ball was a full one that was LBW. There was a wide in there and some of the bowling was rubbish, but I got away with it.

Ben got a wicket that was the faintest of edges caught behind by Jamie, but someone said it wasn't his bat it was his pad buckle/fastner. Again because of the bad scoring it was difficult to ascertain what Ben's figures were. One of the bowlers - Tom Hardy (Chinaman) his bowling wasn't even recorded. The other two spinners Frank and Tom both took wickets, Frank took the wicket of one of our ex players... Liam Rouse who's been know to score double hundreds and hold the B&PCC batting record for most runs in a match as far as I can recall. He was stumped dancing down the wicket. Both Tom and Frank bowled to some of the better batsmen and didn't come off too well as I recall. We bowled them all out for around 150?

Batting

Yeah that didn't go too well either, both the openers went fairly cheaply after a flurry of fours from Frank McLeod. Harrison Birch was probably the star of the side - he hung in there the longest and probably scored the most runs. Ben went for 0 to Liam Rouse, a slow one to start off with and then a massive change up to much faster straight one that had lulled him into a false sense of security. Tom Hardy went for a diamond duck run out with Harrison Birch. I came in at 10 and was joined by Tom's Dad who doesn't play cricket. Once he was bowled that allowed Tom to come back in to make up our 11th player as we were well short of the score needed to win. Tom and I survived several overs at the end and I managed to score a couple of 4's and a few singles but I eventually nicked one to slips.

All in all I enjoyed it, it was a bit cold and the old legs were feeling a bit stiff, but I think that was the same for everyone. They won by a margin of about 60 runs. But the scoring was a tad shoddy, so I don't think anyone could be sure the exact figures, but it's safe to say they won easily.