A Comfortable Win in the End on a Sticky Wicket

Our first home game of the season saw us playing recently relegated Old Albanians IIIs. The MHV front pitch looked a little damp and would prove to play slowly, as expected. Captain Richard Downes lost the toss and the visitors opted to field.
Openers Zafar Basit and Dave Wing were faced by young left arm over the wicket opening bowler M Rasool from the cowfield end. The youngster struggled with the slope and Zaf took full advantage of the legside line, pulling several loose balls profitably, though the slow outfield restricted the number of boundaries throughout the game. At the pavilion end the gentle medium pace of Smith bowled a fairly tight line. In the 5th over Rasool removed the stoutly defending Dave Wing in two minds with a good length ball.
In strode Jon Bird for his first knock of the season but Jon was bowled by Smith for 3. Meanwhile Zaf was looking fairly comfortable until Rasool dragged yet another down the legside only for Zaf to miss the attempted pull and the ball clipped the top of leg stump. Dave Flavell swiftly followed Zaf attempting to drive through midwicket and get a looping leading edge to silly mid on. This left MHV on 42-4 with two new batsmen Sanket Shah and Pete Jaffe at the crease. Sanket and Pete steadied the ship in contrasting styles with Sanket playing his usual aggressive innings and the wily old fox Jaffe pushing ones and twos and dispatching the inevitable bad balls with ease. The partnership proceeded at a good pace until Sanket tried to hit the change bowler back into the cowfield for a second consecutive six and was comfortably caught at long off for a valuable 41. Darshan Raval was given out LBW at the cowfield end not getting far enough forward to K Jagatia for his first duck of the season. Pete Jaffe soon followed for a useful 31 unluckily dragging a wide ball onto his stumps for Jagatia’s third wicket. MHV were now at 119 for 7 with Graham Burton and Lee Crocker in the middle. Nut (26) and Lee (32 not out) both took full advantage of the friendly bowling and the innings rapidly progressed to the defendable total of 172 for 8 and 10 batting points after captain Downes swiftly declared to avoid getting a duck.

The Old Albanians openers were greeted with Ajay Bhatia and Richard Downes bowling with the old ball. The debutant Ajay bowled a lovely spell from the cowfield end with his gentle pace and nagging accurate line gaining three wickets, all bowled. Sanket replaced Downesey and got the stubborn opener S Wakeling out, well caught by Lee Crocker at cover. Darshan Raval replaced Ajay at the far end and was rewarded with two wickets, including an interesting but effective stumping by Zaf off his pads, to leave OAs 7 down. A Dewhurst stubbornly defended, refusing to play a shot until Lee Crocker bowled him. Wingnut took the last two wickets with his accurate bowling to give us a comfortable 109 run victory.

Conclusions: A straightforward win in the end, but poor batting at the start of the innings and midway through led to wickets falling in flurries. Sharper fielding by OA’s, who dropped a number of catches, could have left us with a much smaller total which could be comfortably achieved by a better batting side. That said, the damp wicket was slow with the ball keeping low and not coming on to the bat, as shown by the number of leading edges during our innings, and the slow outfield restricted runs. Our excellent bowling meant that the result was never in doubt but we will need to bat better to be sure of beating the better sides in the league.