Tetherdown Trundlers CC vs. Bohemians CC
Date: Wednesday 9 July
2014: 18:00
Match: Tetherdown Trundlers CC vs.
Bohemians CC
Venue: North Middlesex Cricket
Club
Format 20 overs; Full
International
Result: Bohemians CC 158 beat
Tetherdown Trundlers CC 106 all out. Match lost.
Skipper: Frais
Ducksman: Ritterband (debut en
mallard).
A Scandal in Bohemia
It is too early in the
season to assess the full impact of Mr Newman’s winter ministrations. They’ve
had some positive effect on our results (in that we’ve had some positive
results) and our bowling attack is tighter and more focused than ever. But,
through the effluxion of time and general inattention, whatever effect it had
on our batting seems to be wearing off, as a demoralising capitulation at the
hands of the Bohemians — as wily a troupe of old buzzards as you’ll find in
North London — demonstrated.
Last week against the Maidens we might have had
cause to regret the stolid, leonine, slow-scoring concentration of Mr Colley
but, by gum, we could have used it this Wednesday just gone. No-one in our top
order could get a start, and while there were some heroics from the cheap seats
at the end, it was never going to be enough.
Once more we were obliged to take solace in small
mercies, but when the only one to hand was that we had a man not out at the
end, you can be sure it was not a good day with the bat.
Bohemians’ Innings
It was a bright
afternoon, clouds whipped to a fine meringue by a stout nor’wester, and we were
top billing on North Middlesex’s first XI wicket. It really is a picture to
play on. Even a flipped coin bounces truly on its billiard-table surface, as
Frais was to discover when he journeyed to the middle to lose the toss. We
would field.
These craggy Bohemians might not have looked up to much,
batting in bleached moleskins and business shirts, but soon enough our
liveliest salvos were being met with livelier cover drives, and the returned Mr
Robinson repeatedly found himself knee-deep in the thickets beyond long on,
looking for the ball and grumbling loudly as he went that this sort of carry-on
was the whole reason he gave the game up in the first place.
Eventually Buxton found his range and vigour. He began
peppering pads, probing blockholes and beating outside edges with his usual
flamboyance but, as is also normal, failing to produce anything useful like a
wicket.
That task fell to the relieving bowlers. Ball and
Frais both bowled thoughtfully and with success. Ball became the third Trundler
this season to be sitting on a hat-trick. Alas, the Bohemian in question batted
the trifecta delivery back down the track without incident.
The look on Buxton’s face as he did so spoke of a shameful
pleasure in retaining ownership of the club’s only actual hat-trick. Ritterband
drily queried, to the guffaws of all, whether Buxton’s trophy really even
counted, seeing as it included the wicket of a six-year-old.
With the Skipper regularly chipping batsmen out at
the other end, after ten overs we felt we had contained the main strokeplayers
and were nearing our favourite station amongst the tail. We had as yet incurred
a run rate of little more than five an over. The auguries felt good.
We were right, too: we were near the tail: as it turned out, there was just one serious
batsman left to deal with. We didn’t manage to. And he was quite serious. The
second half of the innings was something of a Bohemian rhapsody.
But it still included some sights which soothe a
sore Trundler’s eye. Principally among them was Mr Robinson at full sail in his
delivery stride. Robinson is a long-standing member and fastidious practiser,
whom circumstance has kept largely from our playing 11 in recent years, and it
was gratifying to see him bowl, even if his keenest contribution was to be
found when fossicking around in the nettles looking for the ball.
Mention also should go to those awarded their new
caps (earned upon a man’s fifth competitive match for the team): Mr Roberts, who
repaid his skipper with a fine fielding performance around the on-side
boundary, and chippy young Mr Ritterband, who had as much to contribute to the
fielding banter as ever, at least until he came out to bat, after which he grew
strangely quiet. Mr Shurman also distinguished himself in the field, stationed
just beyond an artificial wicket the lip of which gave him some anxious
moments, and was a minor revelation with the bat.
Meanwhile the Bohemians’ last recognised batsman
was cooking up a storm. With Ball and Frais spent, Robinson and Shurman bore
the brunt of this onslaught. Gordon and Buxton returned to complete their
allotted four, and both were imperiously spanked, one over-pitched Buxton
delivery flying three hundred metres over long on, leaving the batsman with a
gentle wedge to the green.
Sixty odd after ten translated into 165 from 20;
not out of the question but, at more than eight an over, in need of one or two
solid and vigorous innings from the Tetherdown men.
Trundlers’ innings
With the likes of Messrs
Ball, Roberts, Phillips, Bonfield, Frais and even Buxton in the line-up, we
felt we had the men to do it. But cruel circumstance was to intervene, six
times, in the shape of a half-dozen soft dismissals.
Now a short digression. When you spill this much
ink covering the small-bore calibre cricket peddled by the Trundlers — that is
to say, when your potential universe of readers numbers exactly ten — you
cannot be cavalier with your audience. You must keep them interested. You can’t
very well keep writing “he swung feebly but missed it”. You need to tell a
story, even if you have to make one up.
And so it was, from square leg umpire, your
correspondent looked for a heroic narrative to dispel the mediocre gloom with
his teammates were dressing proceedings. In the stooped figure before him,
hunched over his bat like Old Father Time, he thought he found one. As the sun
lowered, the story of the 2014 Bohemians fixture began to coalesce: it would be
one of a ne’er-do-well batsmen finally making good on his promise, against all
odds sparking a mighty resistance and seeing us home.
Literature students will be interested to know this
tale cleaves to the “rags to riches” archetype – the same one that gave the
world Cinderella, The Ugly Duckling and Police Academy.
With Messrs Ball, Roberts, Phillips and Buxton back
in the pavilion without good excuse and Frais not due in until 7 the Cinderella
of this story, by any sensible reckoning, was Bonfield.
This season, Bonfield has cut a forlorn figure.
While his ugly sisters have been, in their own special ways, larging it up
among the often frankly hopeless bowling that tends to occupy the middle of our
matches, Bonfield has had to deal with each opposition’s openers.
While the amateur teams we play are usually filled
with crocked, crippled, aged, infirm and dyspraxic participants who will be
called upon to bowl at some stage, most have at least one fellow who can hiff
the ball at the stumps straight and with some vim. He’ll be sure to start the
bowling effort off.
This has been Bonfield’s constant torment. With the
grim determination that characterises a certain kind of Englishman, Bonfield has
been sent out to prepare the way: to see that opener off; to sweep out the
hearth, plump the pillows and feather-bed the innings for the louche fellows —
men like Grainger, Roberts and Phillips — ready to come in after him. And just
as these libertines sashay into the bedroom ready to shag themselves silly on
the good linen, poor Bonfield — poor, ascetic, stoic old Bonfield — must drag
his bitter frame back to his cupboard under the stairs to continue his monkish
penury. Poor old Cinders.
But tonight, a long-absent gleam was back in his
eye. Through some kind of subterfuge he had persuaded Skipper Frais to slip him
down the order. He would bat amongst the plodders and halfwits. It was time to
party. A glass-slippered Bonfield strode out, head erect and shoulders thrown expectantly
back.
From his first ball there were signs of the liquid
strokeplay we had all admired in the winter nets. His footwork was nimble, his
front elbow high; in his first over he picked up some tidy singles, in his
second he deftly sliced one behind square, exploiting the gap between gully and
slip with an exquisitely timed late cut: a late, late,
goodness-me-is-that-really-the-time, after-lights-out cut. The next over he exploded
gloriously through the covers: poised, his magnificent blade glistening in the
twilight as the ball scampered joyously into the pickets wide of extra cover.
It felt as though life was finally following the
artist’s script.
But outrageous fortune is an inconstant bedfellow.
No sooner was Bonfield back to his swaggering pomp than did tragedy strike: the
very next ball, though well short of a length, hurried through low and
Bonfield, having reared up to smite it brutishly through point, couldn’t clamp
down on it in time. The death knell rattled. Bonfield’s shoulders assumed their
familiar slump. Somewhere a clock struck twelve and a colossal pumpkin winked
into existence.
We were obliged, therefore to look still further
down the list for a man to pull the sword from the stone.
The scorebook reveals that Frais did as good a job
as anyone tugging at the hilt — indeed better: by some distance he top scored
with 23 — but his means of collecting them was so unassuming that none saw in
him a likely hero. The record tells he smote four fours and a even a six, but
this correspondent is blowed if he can remember any of them. Then he was out,
caught, and our supply of recognised batsmen looked horribly low. A real fairy
tale it would have to be.
The next man in was Ritterband, no stranger to
bordello, bravado and bragodoccio. Now Ritterband has been trading rather
heavily on his reputation, garnered in one seven-over spell at Eltham a year
ago, in which with his skipper he defended his team’s honour against a
succession of maidens. It was a magnificent feat, even if it produced precisely
no runs, but in truth Ritterband has struggled to replicate that kind of form
(and there’s a debate to be had about the value of form that brings a
longevitous nought not out in any case) in his four matches since. Was this our
to be our Pinnochio, then, about to turn himself before our expectant eyes into
a real boy?
No, in a word. Ritterband matched his Eltham total,
it is true, and far more rapidly: his nought at Eltham took thirty-five balls
to acquire; here he was all done in two. No longer must we hear his
protestations about how his wicket is always some other Trundler’s fault: for
this exit there was only one malfeasor: Ritterband. He swung feebly, but
missed.
We would have to descend still further down the
order. Shurman, playing in his second Trundlers’ match, was compiling runs
admirably. He was joined by Robinson, a bowler of the agricultural disposition,
who matched expectations with a brace of lusty blows before falling in the
deep.
And now the barrel was low. In came Grays. In the
Bohemians’ Mr Drew he faced the slowest bowler on the field, possibly in all of
North London, and arguably in Euclidian space-time itself: the pace of Drew’s
deliveries approached an asymptotic theoretical slowness beyond which the laws
of physics will forbid a projectile from taking flight at all. Despite three or
four opportunities to swat the ball away as it made its dead-slow way down the
wicket, Grays still managed not to connect with it and was bowled.
The ninth wicket had fallen. There was a polite
ripple of applause around the field and all gathered at the centre to slap
backs and walk off together, the humble victors and magnanimous beaten
exchanging pleasantries, warmly shaking hands and remarking what a fine game it
had been. But then it became apparent the game was not over. There was one more
to bat.
Even at this late hour, could we have found our
unlikely hero? Was this man the ugly duckling? Out from the shadows of the pavilion
marched Mr Gordon, and we knew; we all at once knew, that today would mark his
emancipation.
And, after a fashion, so it did: there being no
real prospect of anything but defeat and nothing to lose, Gordon did not lose
it; he savaged the bat around, in doing so so clapped one picturesquely through
the the covers to the boundary and outscored Roberts, Buxton, Ritterband and
Grays before falling respectably to Mr Lancaster for a masterful 9. Not quite a
swan, but neither a crispy aromatic duck: that role, and the shirt that denotes
it, awarded to the thoroughly deserving Mr Ritterband.
At last we could retreat to the bar, where tall
tales were told into the evening.