It feels like we have never been away. A beautiful hot sunny day heralded the long awaited reunion of the team. It was clear that little practice had occurred in the winter months with most of the boys proudly showing off their pot bellies and man tits. I am pleased to report we have the same team as last year with the recent addition of Dom a youthful all rounder who fitted in perfectly with a duck and a dropped catch. Your correspondent likes to dream that we have a good mixture of talent, youth and guile (old age) and can give any team a run for there money. Prior to the game I was chatting to one of the oppositions former slow arm deadly bowlers and he spoke at length about this being his 20th year in the club and how this season they had a few South Africans in the fold. Rusty from my winter break I did not pick up the warning signals and maybe in some weird way associated South Africa with a team barely able to get into the semi finals of the World Cup and therefore unable to offer any threat to our superior club team.
For those of you not up to speed with the laws of cricket then can I remind you it's a game with two teams of 11. Therefore, if you give the opponent "extra chances" whilst trying to remove said 11 players you will soon find yourself pissed off......and so the catching fiasco begun. For some inexplicable reason we dropped the lot and there were a lot. I would guess 10 maybe more. I stopped counting. The South Africans (aka Morden) took full advantage of this and amassed perhaps one of the largest opening match scores I have seen. 285 odd runs. In the searing heat of April tempers began to rise, so no surpise that when a pubescent teen was finally bowled by Lawrence, our premier tactical bowler, he was sent back to the pavilion with a stern "Now Fuck off" from Mr Collier. I must pay homage to Winch who executed a brilliant plan to dismiss one of the touring batsmen. Noting the extra bounce Dunbar was getting he moved himself to leg slip, Dunbar sent in another steepler which obligingly came off the glove to Winch, who, going against the form of the day took the catch. Fantastic. When our turn came we were easy fodder. A notable effort from Steve Smith (PB 36) and Spiro's 19 at 0.8 run(s) an over, plus a very near, but not quite, new top score from Ash of 2. Not even the corupt dubious scoring method from Lippitt, who had turned up to witness our demise, could help.
So that was it. A sound thrashing from a league team who got what they came for - a useful pre-season warm up game, buggering off afterwards, making no effort to join us in the pub, probably choosing to go practice some more. However, that could have been because they did not want to buy Lippitt a drink.