Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club

Scorecard

Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club v Bohemians CC on Thu 08 Jun 2017 at 6.00 pm
Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club Lost ran out of gas in the last couple of overs

Match report Tetherdown Trundlers CC vs. Bohemians CC
Date: 8 June 2017
Status: 20 overs
Venue: North London Cricket Club, Shepherds Cot
Result: Bohemians CC (185/7) beat Tetherdown Trunders CC (176/8)
(Golden) Ducksman: Bonfield
A momentous day
ON A THURSDAY evening on which the nation went to the polls the Trundlers gathered under roiling skies to take on their old friends, the Bohemians.
Not as old as usual: while those perennial evergreens Messrs. Archdale and Andrews threw their shadows across the green, some of the old fogies with whom they usually associate were indisposed – queuing at polling stations, supposedly – so Mr. Archdale had cast his net across the divers gentlemen who frequent the Shepherds Cot. He presented with an assortment of Irregulars, Strollers Beamers and even a couple of young Trundlers: Masters Buxton and Heyward would line up against their fathers.
Compared with Frais’ strong and stable line-up, the Bohemians had the air of a coalition of chaos. In Mr. Archdale’s telling of it, it was a government of all the talents. By no means bereft of big beasts: as the elder men went about their sclerotic routines, we beheld our nemesis: the younger Mr. Gray, of the Irregulars, would take the field against us. Again.
North London Cricket Club has bigger boundaries than has Highgate. Frais was determined we’d have better bowling. He lost the toss and was invited to prove it.
Bohemians innings
MESSRS. MORGAN AND Brown came out to open. To be sure, it was not the incandescent start we saw last week from the Irregulars. Still, Mr. Morgan struck the ball well and picked out fielders with an uncanny sense of who was least likely to stop anything. Bonfield, at cover, fell upon his first drive like a collapsing tent. Plimley fetched it from the fence.
The pair sought out quick singles, an activity to which their frames were not suited. They soon came unstuck. Mr. Morgan cracked a fat edge to fine leg. Mr Brown called for a run, not noticing Roberts fielding there.
From rest, Mr. Morgan accelerates like a steam locomotive heading up a hill. He was scarcely outside his own crease before Roberts had the ball into the keeper. From the other end Mr. Brown made better progress but Phillips made no mistake. Mr. Brown was inches short: not for the last time in this game, a batsman was stranded out of his ground.
Out came Mr. Andrews. On his day he is an attractive batsman, but today he struggled with an inelastic towelling head-band. Each time Binns arrived to bowl it would slip down over his eyes.
It is entertaining to watch a cricketer play pin the tail on the donkey when he’s not on your team. Mr. Andrews enjoyed it less; the donkey seemed to want to pin the tail on him. Eventually, Binns pinned it on the top of middle.
Exit a blindfolded gentleman; enter a British howitzer.
Mr. Gray wasn’t fazed by bigger boundaries or more insistent bowling. Just 10 of the 58 runs he would score would oblige him to leave his crease.
Buxton was now wheeled into the attack, muttering about having to run up the hill. Mr. Gray made him run back down it again, to fetch the ball from beyond the long-off boundary. Three balls later Mr. Morgan spooned a catch to Frais at mid-off, but Buxton was already going at eleven an over.
Mr. Meier settled in, content to watch as Mr. Gray’s acrobatic strokeplay continued. Apparently stung by Binns’ earlier criticisms of his onside tendencies, Mr. Gray was pointedly clattering every other ball through extra cover, to the great regret of new man Mee, who had to go and get them.
Mee would now bowl. His first over, an attractive maiden, promised great things, but Mr. Gray was just calibrating the artillery. He let Mee have it in his second over, and by his third had plundered 29.
Mr. Meier picked up the odd run, too but got too much bottom hand on a Buxton sandshoe crusher and chipped it back up the wicket. Time slowed as the ball tumbled in front of the bowler, who sprang forward and caught it an inch above the turf.1
In came Mr. Rose. Up stepped Kohler to bowl.
His first three were flayed. With his fourth, Kohler took the vital wicket of Mr. Gray, though with no malice aforethought on his part whatsoever.
It is exhausting swinging everything to the fence. It’s like chopping firewood with a heavy axe. You can’t do it indefinitely. Having just acquired 50, Mr. Gray thought he would have a breather.
Kohler sent one in – lively, well-directed, creditably outside off stump – and Mr. Gray just watched it. He did not rise from his guard, nor even lift his bat. Phillips took it behind the stumps, and having no slips cordon to whom he could shuck the ball, went to underarm it back to the bowler.
Now wicket keeping gloves are ungainly things. Primarily, they are designed to aid catching and not throwing, but there is a knack which you’d think a fellow as experienced as Phillips would have mastered by now. But the Trundler keeper’s technique let him down. The ball cannoned into the stumps a yard in front of him.
His teammates had embarked upon their usual caustic mockery when it dawned on Plimley, at square leg, that Mr. Gray had been batting outside his crease, and had still not returned to it. Plimley turned to the umpire.
Ribaldry morphed into an energetic, team-wide appeal which the square leg umpire could contrive no grounds to deny. He sent Mr. Gray on his way, stumped, for 58. Phillips affected a look of great wisdom after the fact. Similarly, Kohler’s expression was calculated to suggest this was part of some plan.
Meanwhile, the fireworks had not yet finished.
Robinson came on to close out the innings for the Trundlers, Mr. McAskill to carry it on for the Bohemians.
It is fair to say that Mr. McAskill was the more successful. As they say in his native New Zealand, he “likes his kumaras2”. He put one ball not just over the fence but over the secondary school adjoining it. It was fished out of the waste bins by the refectory, coated in sweet-potato peel.
Nevertheless, a miscue was inevitable. The Trundlers held their catches in the deep, though, and the storm blew itself out, Bohemians finishing their allotted overs
1 A seventeen-stone man “springs forward” the same way one demolishes an industrial chimney: by controlled explosion.
2 The kumara (Ipomoea batatas) is an indigenous sweet potato. Since the time of Lance Cairns it has been said to confer magical strength on New Zealand middle order batsmen.
with Mr. Archdale and young Master Hayward lyrically pushing the ball around rather than manhandling it.
One hundred and eighty-five felt a sturdy total. The Trundlers must not dilly-dally if they were to overhaul it.
Trundlers’ Innings
Goldfinger said, ‘Mr. Roberts, they have a saying in Chicago: “Once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.”’
Roberts looked up. ‘And the fourth time?’
Goldfinger smiled thinly. ‘Come, come, Mr Roberts. Now you’re just being ridiculous.’
– Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (1959)
PHILLIPS IS AN international jet-setter these days. It was a rare treat to have him to open our reply. He was accompanied by Roberts. He raced to six in the first over. A bye saw him to the far end to face the second.
He will have recognised the young man waiting to bowl: Master Buxton, tyro of the North Middlesex under 15s. Master Hayward, skipper of that same side, was at mid-off.
Over the years, both these young men have benefited from the stewardship of Trundlers in various coaching capacities with that team, including Phillips himself. It has not gone to waste. Neither has yet attained his father’s physique (Master Buxton rather hopes he never will), but each has grown into a compact and effective cricketer with few equals in the Trundlers’ team. It is possible that, with all his travels, Phillips had not kept abreast of their progress. He was about to get an update.
Master Buxton’s first crackled off the seam and flew past the outside edge. So did his second. Phillips wedged his bat contritely between his legs each time, as if to pretend he had not just waved it outside off stump.
Master Buxton’s third, a blistering leg stump yorker, drew out Phillips’ famous dead-hand drop. It was all he could do to keep it out. The ball fell to the turf, hissing like a clubbed o’possum.
Phillips decided to take back control. He had his skipper’s mandate to do so: there was no time to pussy-foot around with defensive strokes against callow youths. To Master Buxton’s fourth he flashed his blade. The ball nipped in. He checked his stroke; a blazing cover drive transmuted to a limp waft to Master Hayward, still at mid-off. Phillips departed, consoling himself that the future was in safe hands: the very pair holding the cricket ball he’d just ladled to them.
Next in was Ball. He and Roberts look accomplished at the wicket: balanced postures, level heads, high elbows – that sort of thing. They set about moving the score along in a workmanlike and unremarkable fashion – literally so, in that we will make no further remarks about it.
Happenstance
Instead, cast your minds forward to the 9th over. The score was 70/1, both men ticking along, showing few signs of the misjudgements that illuminate these pages.
At last Roberts, chose to do something noteworthy. To a firm push to mid-off – the man at mid-off, that is, not just the empty section of the field answering that description – Roberts defied expectations (Ball’s, at any rate) and called for a single. Ball was still enquiring whether his partner had quite lost his mind when the bails, to which he would he would have been better served running, were off.
Coincidence
In came Buxton who, of late, has been battling to overcome the shortcomings of his batting technique. It has not been going well. Having resolved that silk purses are for fools and that sows ears are the thing, he began heaving at everything bowled to him. For a time, it seemed to be working.
Then Roberts pushed, firmly, to mid-on.
Having seen what happened to Ball, Buxton thought it best to get to the other end as a priority, and argue about the wisdom of the run later. He now may wish he had waited for Roberts’ call, or heeded it when it came.
For Roberts read the situation correctly this time. “NO!!”, he cried, or words to that effect3.
Mid-off gathered the ball and threw down the non-striker’s stumps.
Enemy action
Next was Hayward.
A man of science, Hayward had deduced that no good comes of Roberts hitting the ball to mid-off: if you don’t run, you’re out; if you do, you’re out.
It was vital, Hayward concluded, that Roberts must be prevented from further off drives. He had played just two in eleven overs, but both had been catastrophic. It was only a matter of time before he played another. Every ball he survived was the commutation of a sentence.
Hayward resolved to save himself. He must get Roberts off strike, and keep him there.
Mr. Meier bowled. Roberts tucked it behind square: nowhere near mid-off. Hayward took his chance.
“YES!” he bellowed, and galloped towards Roberts.
Hayward supposed it was his own risk; he was running to the danger end; why not?
Because Roberts wasn’t running, is why not. He had identified the man at backward square leg, to whom the ball had gone, as a crafty fielder with a lightning-bolt arm. It would be madness to hazard a run on that throw.
It is odd that Hayward had not made the same connection, seeing as the fielder in question was his own son.
As for Master Hayward, there was only one man he had any interest in dismissing. He fetched the ball and rifled it back to Mr. Meier at the bowler’s wicket. At the striker’s end, Roberts leaned on his bat, avoiding Hayward’s eye as he passed by.
Now you’re just being ridiculous
Out came Frais – whose passions run to arithmetic and not science, but who is well versed in probabilities all the same.
It apparently being the case that he was doomed whether he ran or not, and whether Roberts played an off drive or not, there seemed but one course of action open to him. He would have to run Roberts out. Only then would this madness end.
Yet, even as a captain, engineering your own man’s dismissal is harder than you’d think. It requires the agency of three other players, two of whom are not on your side, and while the third is, notionally, at your disposal, he has a direct interest in
3 Robert’s actual words were, “WHAT IN GOD’S NAME ARE YOU DOING, MAN?”
undermining your plan.
As it happened, none of the three men Frais selected to enact his intention came up to brief: the fielder threw to the wrong end, the wicket-keeper dropped it, and Roberts, again, refused to leave his ground despite being commanded to do so by his skipper. Like a young girl in a wheat-field in search of a mandate, Frais scuttled back and forth, found none, and at length made straight for the bar in the clubhouse.
Out came the debutant, Mee. He bowled effectively and displayed a similar disposition when batting. There was no sign of the white line fever afflicting the rest of our middle order.
Rather than hazarding any singles with Roberts, whom the whole side now regarded as “damaged goods”, Mee just clubbed the ball to the boundary. That sorted it out. He launched the next one over long off. This was the spirit. In a jiffy, he had twelve.
It took Mr. Rose and his crafty spin to account for him, holing out in the deep: an innings that, aside from its brevity, had little of the cheerful ineptness that characterises our batting.
That would come instead from Bonfield, who followed.
Having concluded that running Roberts out was no more feasible than preventing him doing it to you, Bonfield reasoned there was nothing for it but to give up his own wicket before anything worse could happen to it. He shouldered arms to a McAskill yorker and retired to the pavilion.
Now, all other things being equal, the required run rate looked ambitious.
The “other things” in this case were not equal. They were Binns and Robinson, so it looked flat-out impossible. So it proved. With McAskill’s boiler now at full pressure, it did not take long to account for Binns.
After playing the most exquisite, disguised, late cut through the slips for four – really, quite brilliant: it looked for all the world like a pull to midwicket – Robinson did not add to his score. His response to the Roberts conundrum was to refuse to leave his ground in any circumstances. At the conclusion of our innings we were nine runs short: Robinson not out 4, Roberts not out 70, and the estimable Kohler – who has won games for us in this location before – still in the hutch.
We can only wonder what might have happened if we had run the campaign properly.

Bohemians CC Batting
Player name RunsMB4s6sSR
extras
TOTAL :
7nb 11w 6lb 
for 7 wickets
24
185 (20.0 overs)		     
Brown ct  Buxton c. Frais 12
Morgan Run out  15
Andrews b  Binns 0
Gray st  Kohler 58
Meier ct  Buxton c. Buxton 8
Rose ct  Robinson c. Phillips 28
McAskill ct  Kohler c. Buxton 29
Hayward Not Out  10
Archdale Not Out  1
Pfeiffer  
Owen  

Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club TTCC 1st XI Bowling

Player NameOversMaidensRunsWicketsAverageEconomy
Simon Binns4.0029129.007.25
Adam Frais3.002100.007.00
Olly Buxton4.0035217.508.75
Richard Mee3.012900.009.67
Joe Kohler3.0027213.509.00
Neal Robinson3.0037137.0012.33

Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club TTCC 1st XI Batting
Player Name RMB4s6sSRCatchesStumpingsRun outs
extras
TOTAL :
 
for 8 wickets
0
176		        
Steve Phillips ct  Buxton A c. Hayward L 6 1 1 1
Justin Roberts Not Out  70 8
Sam Ball Run out  40 7
Olly Buxton Run out  18 2 1 2
Bruce Hayward Run out  1
Adam Frais Run out  6 1
Richard Mee ct  Rose 12 1 1
Duncan Bonfield b  McAskill 0 1 0
Simon Binns b  McAskill 6
Neal Robinson Not Out  4
Joe Kohler  

Bohemians CC Bowling

Player nameOversMaidensRunsWicketsAverageEconomy
Owen2.002000.0010.00
A Buxton4.0027127.006.75
McAskill4.0030215.007.50
Archdale3.004000.0013.33
Meier4.003600.009.00
Rose2.0022122.0011.00