Tetherdown
Trundlers CC vs. the Muswell Maidens CC
Date: Monday 30 June 2014: 18:00
Match: Tetherdown Trundlers CC vs. the Muswell Maidens CC
Venue: North Middlesex
Format 20 overs; Full International
Result: Tetherdown Trundlers CC 140/2 beat The Muswell Maidens CC 132/6.
Match won.
Skipper: Frais
Ducksman: Bonfield, with some hesitation.
On youth versus experience
You would think a
team laid low by overconfidence might be a bit diffident in their next outing.
After the disappointment of Cuxham the lads picked themselves up for a Monday
fixture with the Muswell Maidens, a collection of gents similar in time and
space, oriented around the Rhodes Avenue primary school on the far side of
Muswell Hill (the less neurotic one with the more exciting parents’ parties).
The Maidens are starting out: this was their maiden
voyage, and they are imbued with the same undirected energy and unfocused
enthusiasm the Trundlers showed in 2011. For the men of Tetherdown it did not
translate into results for a long time. Perhaps, thought the Head Trundler, the
same would be so for the Maidens.
As a summer storm emptied itself on a North
Middlesex track that is low and slow at the best of times, Frais lost the toss
and was told to bat. The outfield was wet, the wicket greasy and barely receptive
to bounce, seam, turn, or the holding of a planted cricket spike.
Trundlers’ Innings
Now if Frais
wanted to signal intent, his batting order hardly telegraphed a foot on the
windpipe. Mr. Smith – to be sure, a cricketer whose presence with bat in hand
does not speak of messing about – would open, but he would be accompanied by Mr
Gordon, whose most certainly does.
Gordon was most recently relieved of the duck shirt
at Cuxham. There are those (notably his successor, Bonfield) who say the Karori
man’s persistence in the acquisition of nil scores has been so single-minded
and his talent for achieving them so overwhelming that the shirt should be
retired and awarded to him permanently, like the Jules Rimet trophy once was to a bunch of nimble South Americans.
(O! Brazil! How the past is a foreign country!)
Gordon’s “way with the willow” seems to vouchsafe
that outcome anyhow: it is never more than a brief passage of play before any
man to whom he has temporarily ceded the shirt is able to pass it back. The man
on this occasion, Bonfield, had not even had the chance to wear it – indeed, he
had petulantly declared he would not wear
it
– when Gordon walked out to the middle and rendered the matter of academic
interest only.
That the Wellingtonian should have any interest in
leading out the innings, given the sorrowful outcomes whenever he has tried
this before, speaks to the man’s indomitable spirit and fantastical optimism, a
disposition not universally shared among his brother Trundlers. Heads shook in
dumbfounded admiration as he departed on his brief journey andare e ritorne.
It is said that Marshal Bosquet remarked, as the
Light Brigade rode onwards into that Crimean valley of death, “c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la
guerre”. Grainger’s face as Gordon vaulted the boundary rope on his way to
the wicket was suggestive of similar thoughts, but concerning common sense and
not war.
So, Gordon would open the batting, he would take
the strike, and he would deliver the Trundlers yet another first in a season
already full of them: a diamond duck.
It was a delivery of firsts for our opposition,
too: a first game, a first ball, a first over and, when Gordon defied no
expectations at all and vacated the guard of middle stump he had just taken, a
first wicket – indeed, a first wicket maiden. The Muswell Maidens’ trophy
cabinet was spoken for in toto in the
very first over of the day.
Gordon’s lamentable departure brought Colley to the
wicket.
Sometimes our champion plays with the carefree
abandon of an obstreperous child; today he bore the aspect of a man sent out
after tea on the third day with instructions to save the test. If he built a
foundation at Cuxham, he fashioned an entire subterranean cave system with his
bare hands at North Middlesex: in a twenty-over match; no mean feat. It is true
there were moments when Colley’s natural flair got the better of him, but they
dwindled as he made his way unselflessly through the “nervous forties”: the run
rate lagged; our goal of a ton and a half looked more and more forlorn.
With Colley a tenement squatter at one end, the job
of moving the scoreboard along was left to the successive occupants at the
other, and it can be reported that Smith compiled a characteristically elegant
41, Phillips played his usual belligerent hand for 22 and, when Colley was
finally forcibly retired on reaching his half century, the debutant McGregor
and Grainger finished the innings with a chippy 2 and 7, each not out,
respectively. McGregor thus assumes the rare bird role of the Undefeated: never
dismissed in Trundler’s colours.
The remainder got to sit and watch. Just two actual
dismissals in amassing our total of 140 – one of them Gordon’s, so hardly
counting – suggested we had treated the pitch with a bit more respect than it
deserved and we would have some defending to do.
Muswell Maidens’ Innings
The Maidens did
not bowl like a team who had never played before; if they declined to bat like
one, we might be in trouble.
Frais was unfazed. He rested his usual New Zealand
openers and instead bowled himself and Morris (again instinctively being styled
Maurice by the scorers). He quickly
discovered that opening the bowling isn’t as easy as it looks; certainly not
when you are reusing a ball from the first innings which has the consistency of
soaked lentils wrapped in a chamois.
We may never know what the skipper’s expectation
was when he neared the bowling crease for the first time, but it is a safe bet
the outcome didn’t exceed it: he was contemptuously manhandled through extra
cover for four by Mr Craig, the Maidens’ opener. His second ball was similarly
treated, only to be intercepted athletically by McGregor at long-off.
At the other end, Morris found the damp conditions
no more to his liking. He had trouble pitching the ball to Mr Paul, the other
opener, who had trouble striking it, spooning it lamely to Gordon at mid-on,
who had trouble catching it. Normally there is great revelry when a Trundler
drops sitter – it is in large part why our games are so enjoyable – but the
squall behind Gordon’s eyes was apparent around the oval, and all that could be
heard were solemn commiserations.
Nonetheless the game turned around. As have so many
before him, Craig misjudged a Morris full toss, this time so completely that no
Trundler was required to catch it, and so he was sent to the pavilion. While Mr
Paul took full advantage of Gordon’s clemency and carried his bat, he did so in
a manner so cautious that Frais felt little cause to man the boundary. The
Maidens sent men in, but each of them struggled to stay with the Australian
opener.
The highlights of our bowling effort came from
quarters who should not be disappointed to be described as unlikely. Grays was
a revelation, at least in responding to questions the umpire then wished he’d
never asked.
First, the official enquired of the new man’s
bowling action.
Grays’ head dropped. “Well, it’s not very good,” he
said.
“Yes,” said the umpire, “but what is it? What do
you bowl?”
Grays looked baffled. He shrugged. “The ball?” he
replied.
“Yes,” tried the umpire again, “but how do you bowl
it?”
It occurred to Grays that he was being mocked. But
if this was a trick question, he was its equal. “In the corridor of uncertainty
outside off stump,” he announced sagely, parroting something he’d heard on Test
Match Special which sounded rather good.
“But which arm?” hissed the official.
“BOTH ARMS YOU CLOWN!” roared Grays. When he gets
in this sort of mood, Grays is not a man to be trifled with.
The umpire tried a different tack. “Are you left-
or right-handed?”
Grays brightened at once. “Oh! I see! I’m right
handed.”
“Over the wicket or around?”
“Oh, I think I’ll just go around. I have to be
careful with my back at my age, you know.”
The umpire motioned the non-striker to the left
hand side of the wicket.
“What are you doing now?” cried Grays. I’m about to
come and bowl there, you fool!”
Without a further backward glance the umpire
addressed the batsman: “right arm over the wicket,” and Grays’ bewitching spell
was underway. It didn’t result in many wickets – any, in fact – but it did tie
the batsmen down at a time when they needed to be getting on with it.
Frais, still of a view that the game’s result was
safe, was so liberal with the bowling changes, (Smith a couple here, Grainger
an over there, now McGregor, now Kohler) that the scorer (perhaps also on his
maiden outing) became quite overwhelmed, crossing things out, using all kinds
of non-standard glyphs and ambiguous notations and at one point leaving an
entire over unaccounted for, uncredited and floating free in a vacant square in
the south eastern quadrant of the scorebook. We may never know who bowled it:
the balls that weren’t wide took a pelting, so its author is hardly likely to
own up.
So you’ll forgive your correspondent a little
impressionism in relating the remainder of the day’s events. At last Gordon
came on and took two. This restored his yin and yang. Grainger, in a brief
spell, got another.
At length Buxton was presented the ball, if you
could still call it that – hardly the glossy, gold-emblazoned conker an opener
is used to – to see what he could do. For the third time in as many matches he
found himself confronting an eight year-old. Having no wish to suffer again the
Grainger glare of reproach, Buxton put his first essay full of length and
comfortably outside off, where no wickedness could come of it.
Nor did it: not from the batsman’s perspective, at
any rate. The young lad planted his front foot and lent into a drive that
Gordon Greenidge would have been pleased about; the ball cantered between
Colley’s legs at cover, was unimpeded there and, unharrassed by that usual lion
of a fieldsman, continued unurgently towards the fence. Colley proceeded after
it with all the alacrity of a workshy constable chasing a jaywalker. The look
he shot his bowler as he set off suggested he felt it was Buxton who should be
apologising to him for making him
run.
The youngster having demonstrated himself capable
of handling something feistier, the Trundlers man now opened up his throttle
and plotted a tighter line towards leg stump. Alas, he lost his grip on the
ball – which was like a soap bar, bear in mind – and sent the ball at chest
height (knee height to a man of ordinary stature, he later protested) to the
lad who, with a warrior’s disregard for his own welfare went to pull in front
of square but missed. The boy collected a lively beamer in the kidneys.
Again, the hiss of disapproval rang around the
slips cordon. It only really died down in the following over when Kohler did
exactly the same thing. However, this time the urchin hooked Kohler
contumeliously into the fence backward of square. His reaction immediately on
letting the ball go went something like this: “Ooh! No! Sorry! [thwack] Why! You little bastard!”
“So now you see what it’s like,” said Buxton. “At
least I hit him.”
Eschewing his front line bowlers almost entirely,
Frais now seemed to be doing what he could to keep the game alive and so it was
it came down to the last over with the Maidens requiring some 25 runs to win.
Mr Bonham Carter was on strike and made a better fist of it than Buxton might
have liked but, as stumps were drawn the Maidens were a respectable eight short
(six of whom were already in the bar) and already talking about a second
fixture.