We won the toss (John managing to flip the coin properly for a change) and elected to field on a surface that only looked different from the outfield because of the white lines on it. But the deck was still nice and hard and it promised to give the bowlers a fair bit of assistance in conjunction with a helpful crosswind.
Navin Wewala (4-0-23-0) and Dave Watson (2.4-0-6-1) opened the bowling with Dave taking the first scalp before pulling up lame the very next ball. While a lot of balls beat the bat we also found that others sat up even on a good length and were quickly dispatched. John Murrie (8-3-29-1) and Craig Dawson (6-0-31-2) took over from there and bowled some tight overs that pulled back the run rate considerably. A fantastic piece of wicket keeping from Tim saw another wicket fall and Craig snapped up one more before the break leaving Old Boys on 83-4. After drinks Old Boys innings consisted on small partnerships interupted by quick wickets. Two batsmen in particular Joe Ward (45) and M.Pouwels (44) proved difficult to remove. But some great fielding including two one handed catches to Dave and Glen, and a well taken C&B to Matt Middleton kept us on top. More great bowling from Cory Adams and Matt Middleton finished off the innings and while Old Boys kept up the pressure we managed to bowl them out for 174 in the 39th over.
With Dave Watson returning for this match we had an extremely strong batting line up and were very confident at the start of our innings. Joe's inswing is always difficult but can be countered if your careful, but it was his partner at the other end D.Hamilton (8-1-28-3) who proved a nightmare for both openers - John Murrie (7) and Navin Wewala (11). Both were trapped on the crease with balls regularly flying past the outside edge or their faces as the ball popped and seamed all over the show. Sadly their opening partnership of 18 was the best we could muster followed by a 17 run partnership between Sheriff and Navin for the 2nd wicket. After that wickets tumbled regularly including 3 in 2 overs to S.Mudgway (2-0-7-3). With Glen suffering a bad hand injury in the field we only had 9 wickets and after 23.1 overs were bowled out for a very limp 74. Only two batsmen Navin (11) and Sheriff (19) managed to reach double figures in what was a very disappointing display.
While our fielding and bowling effort was extremely good we need to make a huge improvement to our batting before next week.
Result
