Three Bridges CC 242/9 vs. Tetherdown Trundlers CC 178 all out. Match Lost.
Date: 1 September 2013
Match: Three Bridges CC vs. Tetherdown CC
Venue: Harrow Recreation Ground
Status: Limited Overs (35); Full Test Status
Result: Three Bridges 242/9 beat. Tetherdown
178 all out. Match Lost.
Skipper: Venerable Trundler Phillips
Ducksman: Honourable Trundler Bonfield, Succeeded
by Honourable Trundler Gordon
Reporter: Honourable Trundler Buxton
If you’ll allow me a culinary
metaphor, a Trundlers game without a little bit of spice would be like dick
that wasn’t spotted: just not our kind of pudding. And, while certainly there
was to be no trifling with Sunday’s opponents, the good gentlemen of Three
Bridges Cricket Club certainly did their bit, serving an excellent chicken
curry between innings. Matters of interpretation – cultural differences in
fielding and umpiring protocols within our number – provided a bit more.
An excellent Trundlers outing,
that is to say, with a classic Trundlers outcome, in which we managed to snatch
a merely sound beating from the jaws of an utterly comprehensive one.
The Harrow Recreation Ground is
a delightful cricketing locale. With Sunday’s benevolent weather it presented
quite the carnival scene: in the distance a brass band limbered up for a Sunday
recital; nearer by children gambolled happily at the tug of war. Periodically,
lovelorn couples lumbered like stupefied oxen through the covers, paying little
heed to our admonitions to flee at once for their own safety.
Three Bridges’ Innings
Three Bridges won the toss and
chose to bat. We took the field looking resplendent in Trundler caps and
shirts: we are developing into a smartly-attired outfit indeed. At skipper
Phillips’ invitation, Grainger delivered one of his rousing orations about the
importance of commitment in the field and being hard-handed. Or hard-headed, or
hard-hearted, or half-arsed. Something like that, anyway.
Suitably aroused, we scattered
to the four points of the compass and may have lost communication altogether
were it not for lusty bellowing from all corners. To say it was a fair sized
pitch is not to do it justice: the Harrow outfield resembled the boundless
grass plains of the upper Caucasus. Bonfield, the afternoon’s Ducksman, looked
dismayed to be asked to patrol an area the size of Dagestan, but dutifully
trotted off with the air of a Georgian bison farmer, inadvertent to the gleeful
barracking shortly to come his way. Ritterband disappeared over the horizon in
the direction of Long On. New man Sefton packed a ruck sack, three days
provisions, and set off for Deep Extra Cover. He hasn’t been heard from since.
The harsh sun beat down, low in
the September sky, and while in later exchanges Bonfield manfully refrained
from protesting about it, it is true he was blinded for much of the afternoon,
a factor which no doubt had a part to play in his travails.
The wicket itself was
well-prepared and benign. The local openers quickly made it clear they weren’t
about to waste their 35 overs, swinging exuberantly at each of our openers’
first deliveries. The outfield was lightning fast (though curiously it slowed
abruptly at about the time of the innings changeover: credit to the home
skipper for exploiting that piece of local knowledge).
With the track providing little
assistance neither of the Kiwi openers had much luck finding edges or wickets,
but both were finding the middle of the bat regularly enough. Before long
Messrs Morris, Ritterband, Grainger and Frais each found themselves padding
hundreds of yards after balls they hadn’t properly seen zip past their noses in
the first place.
The poor cherry got such a
pummelling, indeed, that after 10 overs or so it had to be retired hurt,
disfigured and misshapen, a gambit which gave Gordon the idea to try the same
thing. He began hobbling around like a crocked pensioner, and was soon
stationed in the gully, bearing the subtle smirk of a chap who knows he’ll not
be made responsible for three square miles at deep midwicket.
Bonfield was not so canny.
Dressed in a Stetson, a duster and armed with riding crop, the Ducksman
periodically had to shoo bovine passers-by off his ranch as well as making some
effort to trap the succession of pulls, hooks and on-drives rifling through it.
The team needed a breakthrough,
and through the warhorse Colley, by Jove, they got one. He struck the off stump
with his very first ball. Shot selection played its part: the Bridges opener
seemed determined to set some sort of land speed record and had tried to knock
Colley’s ball – typically lively and straight – into neighbouring Ossetia.
The opener’s departure seemed
like a positive development until Dusty, the Bridges’ skipper, arrived at the
crease, only to start hitting the ball even harder. A couple seemed lost in
brambles over the border, in Armenia. One made it with a single bounce into the
Caspian.
Binns, ever grateful for the
hospital pass, took over the bowling from the Tbilisi End and here the ordeal
of those fielding in the vast midwicket steppe became horribly apparent. It was
also, by coincidence, at about this time that the brass band struck up a medley
of circus tunes.
Poor Bonfield, in particular,
bounded woozily around like a purblind old sheepdog, this way and that, as
projectiles whizzed past his nose in whichever direction he wasn’t going at a
given instant. I don’t mind admitting I was rather enjoying this from my
station at deep point, beneath a mature glade of luxuriantly foliaged
chestnuts, covering the one stroke the batsmen didn’t seem minded to play. It
was at this time that the excitement overcame me, and I confess I offered
Bonfield some words of long-distance advice - well intended, I assure you –
though on reflection perhaps capable of misconstrual. Presently, a word or two
came floating back on the summer breeze, offering less scope for
interpretation. Not only does he field like one, Bonfield can swear like a
Chechen cowhand too.
And it would be unfair to single
him out: Frais, relieved of the Duck and captaincy but still a spiritual elder,
made some spectacular muffs in the field, failing even to hold on to one that
hit him hard enough to collapse his chest, noticeably concave when he revealed
it to all after the match. Even mighty Achilles, getting frightfully tangled up
and nowhere near a soaring stroke of great altitude at the long on boundary,
provided his brothers a comic moment, though this might not have been his own
recollection. (Isn’t it funny how people can view the same things so
differently!)
Then the ever-sartorial,
ever-crafty* and ever-dependable Mr Morris, whose chief means of attack is the
confoundment of expectation, came forward. When he lobbed in a gentle, waist
high pie the batsman will have had a range of possible outcomes in mind,
between setting off air-raid sirens in Ingushetia and clearing the Black Sea
altogether. It’s a safe bet he didn’t expect to lose his off stump and depart
the theatre of conflict with his head in hands, but that’s what he found
himself doing.
The remaining bowlers tightened
the supply of runs for a while. Grainger bowled with elegance and patience but
without success. Ritterband, whose left arm orthodoxy is so slow as to induce
neurosis in certain men, had better luck. He gives the ball so much flight that
it requires considerable patience just to wait the delivery out without
checking your email and popping out for a cig. His second over was a maiden. By
his third the ball was spending so long between fingers and turf that the poor
batsman had quite forgotten what he had come in for, looked visibly startled
when the ball suddenly landed, and devastated as it went on its stately way
through his wicket, whereupon he departed, in a funk, for a duck.
Not for the first time, we came
to regret an inconvenient wicket. This poor man’s replacement had no such
trouble with his attention span and plundered 22 of Ritterband’s next nine
deliveries. Skipper Phillips had seen enough, and welcomed back Sefton (or
someone looking like him) like a prodigal son returning across the prairie.
Sefton bowled straight and true - well, at least, I think he did: mysteriously,
the scorebook carries contains no record of his contribution at all.
Frais arrived late in the piece
(later, in this correspondent’s view, than he should have) and bowled as
parsimoniously as ever, also winkling out a wicket. In the last four overs
Bridges re-gathered themselves and finished up with a further period of hefty
hitting. Binns’ final over boasted the remarkable proportions of conceding 12
runs but achieving two wickets, one of which, at the fifteenth time of asking,
was actually a catch.
Trundlers’ Innings
This left us with the galling
prospect of hitting 242 off 35 overs, which the back of an envelope told us was
a required run rate of roughly seven an over, from a club with little tradition
of fast scoring, or much in the way of run accumulation at all.
Undeterred, Ducksman Bonfield
and skipper Phillips stalked out, windmilling bats, with regular umpiring
openers Buxton and Gordon accompanying them. The Bridges bowling attack was not
as cavalier as its batsmen, but it was commendably straight. The ball on
occasion kept low. While both openers survived early appeals for leg before,
presently Phillips was chuntering along happily enough, and Bonfield was plying
a respectable trade in leg byes and assorted extras. If the Trundlers weren’t
quite going at the required clip, they were manageably close to it.
Bonfield was the first to go,
caught off the opener. He left the wicket with the satisfaction of knowing his
score was an infinite multiple of his previous one, tempered by the knowledge
that, while this was mathematically true, he’d still only scored one run.
Out came Grainger, who in whites
and with his cap perched at a rakish angle, cuts a figure not unresemblent of
David Niven.
As an umpire of long standing I
can tell you that different batsmen conduct their relationships with onfield
officials in a variety of ways. Some are voluble and affable. Some are
monosoyllabic; outside of requesting a guard, speaking only when spoken to. One
or two maintain a rock-jawed, stony silence at the crease (but can be
enthusiastic about offering opinions later). Openers tend to be crisply
professional, offering little by way of conversation. Lower order men are more
gabby, keen to talk about anything to dissipate the tension. Tail-enders just won’t
shut up.
Grainger is the typical number
3: taciturn, professional, face set with concentration on a job to do. There’s
the odd, civil word but, in truth, not much levity. This approach translated
into a fine batting display. His stroke-making was fluid; he picked off ones
and twos and, when the moment called for it, flashed one over the ropes. With
the skipper at the other end in more expansive mode – albeit living a little
dangerously at times – all suddenly seemed to be well. The opening bowlers retreated,
and spinners came on.
For the first time I can
remember there was genuine, collected surprise at the fall of a Trundlers
wicket. Out of the blue, Phillips was beaten by Bridges’ slow left armer.
Not to worry: Achilles strode to
the crease donning a (non-regulation) green helmet, yellow blu-blockers and
sporting one of those rock-like jaws I was telling you about. He too looked
like business, and having taken a guard of middle stump with a single word –
whichh he may now wish had been “leg” – Colley set about the Bridges bowling
con brio.
Six boundaries in 14 scoring
strokes took him to a brisk 35, and only one apparent chink in the armour: a
slight tendency to be rapped on the front pad. On one occasion the whole
Bridges team went up but umpire Gordon – usually unstinting about these things
– kept his trigger finger in his pocket. The next over the same thing happened
from my end and, well, LBW controversy just seems to follow me around, doesn’t
it?
Between the under 11s of
Highgate CC and North Middlesex CC we have had a marvellous series of matches
this summer for the Pittman Cup. The respective coaches – many from among our
number – have agreed that LBWs are not to be given unless it’s really, really
out.
It’s a good rule – it is with a
heavy heart that one meets the anxious look of a ten year-old with a raised
finger – but the youngsters have had no trouble accepting it, so I invoked it
when a straight, low ball struck Colley’s ankle in front of his middle stick.
His demeanour suggested he felt I shouldn’t have, though of course the
batsman’s perspective is uniquely unsuited to judging the alignment of a ball
in front of him with some wooden poles behind. Whatever sense of perspective he
did have was well and truly gone by the time I returned to the pavilion to put
my own pads on an over later, but at least he had rediscovered his vocabulary.
I got to try out a bit of mine, too.
The recognised batsmen weren’t
finished yet: Frais, fresh from his heroic last stand at Eltham, and much more
of a conversationalist at the crease, took Colley’s place. He too started
chipping away with deftly placed singles and he too had got a start before
skying one off the spinner and returning for 13. Debutant Sefton made his way
out to the middle, cracked a handsome stroke just short of the boundary, missed
one soon after and returned for three.
In the intervening time the run
rate had got away on us a little, and I embarked with the encouraging words
that we only needed 12 or so an over to win. Everything seems to be back to
normal after my anomalous display at Eltham: it took a couple of overs, but
eventually someone put one on the sticks and, per my habit, I missed it.
I am obliged to report at this
stage the things were starting to take a familiar turn. My successor Binns
returned for four. Then Grainger, not long a masterful half-centurion, was
stumped.
All at once Gordon found his
fielding chicanery repeating on him. Not only would he have to bat, but he would
have to affect a limp and take a runner too. This much we can understand; what
possessed him to choose Binns of all people we’ll never know. It turned out not
to matter: not even Binns’ inter-stump acuity would save his blushes.
Momentarily distracted, I didn’t
actually see what happened, but I heard it, and the audio tells the story well
enough: a grunt, a xylophonic clink of bails, and a chorus of cackling from the
inner ring. It was enough to know that Gordon’s innings was over. Both men were
back in the pavilion in a jiffy, Gordon barely having taken a chair when his
old friend the duck shirt landed on his shoulder. Mr Morris, who had been
piloting the gigantic scoring contraption like Han Solo in a swarm of Tie
Fighters, was relieved of his command and sent out to defend our rear end.
It was a limited overs game, so
a draw was not on the cards, but enough resistance at least to still be batting
at the close might have been something. It was not to be: in the last over
Morris took a single and a two before being swiftly caught in the fading light,
leaving one small welcome surprise: Ritterband, not out on two, to add to the
epochal nought not out he had taken at Eltham. As yet undefeated in Trundlers
colours, then, and I dare say deserving of a promotion up the order.
*This is,
again, a label he ought not to be aggrieved to hear gives him the benefit of
some doubt.