Winners & Losers

So it goes.

The frog hopped out as I was picking the last of this year's 20+kilos of strawberries and a blackbird deposited the still warm body a few feet away, presumably clearing the nest of one that didn't make it.

It's one thing to lose when you're in nice surroundings and you think you've given your all, but when the drone of the M5, drizzle, the peculiarities of human behaviour and the frailty of the aging human form make the afternoon not all that enjoyable you sometimes wish you'd been at home to answer the call from your crying teenage child, which must have come close to the moment that the ball, destined for a six, held up on a strong gust of south-westerly wind and found its way into the fielder's greedy hands.

Oh. You want a proper match report?

Brislington won the toss and inserted the Cowboys on a lively batting wicket and despite losing Wayne and his toe early on, the run rate was gurt awesome for a long while, thanks to Mister Higgins' masterful display of square cutting and stuff, ably supported by the early order. After his departure for 70 the team rallied to bat out the 40 overs, ending up on 220-8, some 20 or more runs short of what might have been possible but respectable nonetheless, give or take the odd, remarkable run out.

Drizzle interfered a bit towards the end of the innings and continued throughout and after tea. Brislington didn't appear to want to come out to play. Was it a bluff? A tactical delay within the rules pertaining to weather? A ploy to make us round off our almond slices with a(nother) pint? It didn't seem any worse then than when we'd been batting. Pass the rule book. Oh, it's stopped.

OK. Set mental calculator to 5.5 an over. Anything less, we're winning. Some tight, aggressive opening bowling from Hidayat, supported by Andy C saw to that and kept the openers down. Then, in the skipper's own words 'it went a bit pear shaped'. This was directly related to said skipper's plan of coming on to bowl and offering up ripe strawberries for the batsmen, one of whom eventually filled his punnet to 111 not out. There was a glimmer of spirited and wiley resistance to accompany the frequent trips to retrieve the ball from the hedges (three were found in one, the true one the soggiest) but against a very solid batting performance the bowling lacked the penetration and depth blah blah, especially as some shirker was claiming incapacity and in others it was quite apparent.

The opposition completed the task within 27 overs for the loss of only 2 wickets.

Scorecard