Another lovely day at Bushy Park saw TCC inserted to bat first and Matt decided last week’s centurion Olly “should probably continue opening” and the pair of them walked out together. Alas time spent together was short as SKLP’s tall opening left arm bowler clean bowled Matt early doors and Dilan for a duck to see TCC looking shaky. Faz and Olly batted sensible but never really got going against a disciplined attack. After a few nice shots Faz departed for 31 to be replaced by Nick who batted very sensibly. Olly also departed for 22, Nigel came and went and despite Tauseef hitting a couple of lusty blows, we rather tamely limped to 137 all out, with Nick McLellan topscoring with 32.
However, with Tauseef and Olly opening the bowling you never know. Well, SKLP’s opener had other ideas and went after the total somewhat rapidly with Taus taking a lot of stick as the bowl disappeared to all parts and Olly in tandem struggling from the far end on a very blustery day. The scoreboard reached 34 in very short time before Taus clean-bowled the main opener for some respite. SKLP’s number 3 batsmen was dreadfully unlucky, when he played a firm shot only to have the middle-aged Khan stop it and he was then runout by a fielder impersonating a beached whale with Matt catching the ball and whipping the bails off. It obviously wasn’t his day.
At this point we took tea and came back with Dilan getting a wicket straight away and despite the score being 68-3 we were giving it a good go. Alas we had a catch dropped behind straight away and had also dropped the other opener who played what would be described by Wisden as “dogged innings” and to fair to SKLP the two batsmen refused to take many chances and slowly made their way to the total. We finally got one of the wicket well held by Hamza from Nick’s bowling and despite a bit of banter at the end with the middle Khan having his first bowl in over 15 years the remaining batsmen was happy to get to the total in singles and he finished on 71 not out.
A good game all around, we needed more runs to put on a competitive total and despite this, if we had taken some of the chances, it would have been interesting.
Last point for historians – this was the official date that Tauseef and Matt declared “banter war”
between each other - the phoney war over previous seasons is now over.
Author: Jamie Khan