Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club

Scorecard

Three Bridges CC v Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club on Sun 01 Sep 2013 at 13:30
Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club Lost

Match report 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.

Olly

Three Bridges CC Batting
Player name RunsMB4s6sSR
extras
TOTAL :
 
for 8 wickets
0
241 (35.0 overs)		     
Mahul b  Morris 50
Johnny b  Colley 15
Dusty b  Buxton 68
Basil Run out  13
Sunny b  Frais 30
Rory b  Ritterband 0
Anis ct  Binns c. Buxton 49
Aldo b  Binns 5
   
   
   

Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club TTCC 1st XI Bowling

Player NameOversMaidensRunsWicketsAverageEconomy
Olly Buxton7.0223123.003.29
Marcus Gordon4.002500.006.25
Simon Binns6.0049316.338.17
Liam Colley4.0036136.009.00
Richard Morris3.0024124.008.00
Guy Grainger5.003900.007.80
Simon Ritterband4.0029129.007.25
Adam Frais2.00818.004.00

Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club TTCC 1st XI Batting
Player Name RMB4s6sSRCatchesStumpingsRun outs
extras
TOTAL :
11w 7b 7lb 
for 10 wickets
25
178		        
Duncan Bonfield ct  Venkat 1
Steve Phillips b  Rory 27 5
Guy Grainger st  Anis 55 6
Liam Colley lbw  Edwards 35 6
Adam Frais ct  Anis 13 2
James Sefton b  Anis 3
Olly Buxton b  Harood 13 3 1
Simon Binns b  Harood 4 1
Simon Ritterband Not Out  2
Marcus Gordon b  Harood 0
Richard Morris ct  Hardeep 3

Three Bridges CC Bowling

Player nameOversMaidensRunsWicketsAverageEconomy
Fido5.001000.002.00
Venkat6.0037137.006.17
Harood7.0042314.006.00
Rory3.0013113.004.33
Dusty5.002200.004.40
Edward3.001500.005.00
Anis4.001728.504.25
Hardeep1.20515.003.75