It was a confident 2nd team that travelled to Withyham: including the acme of batsmen, the temporarily single, Mick Johnson, the well-travelled refugee from hotel life, Russell Smith (who gave up a trip to Middlesbrough to be with us), and our occasional stars, Gary Hukin and Andre Pampellone.

Captain Brown won the toss and elected to bat. At this point, Paul – our established opener – was making his way from Shoreham, having assumed that we had a home game. Questioned, on his arrival, as to whether he had a fixture card he said that he had last year’s.

Withyham have a lovely, secluded, parkland ground and a pleasant, old fashioned pavilion with hanging baskets on the veranda. The latter should not have caused a problem to an experienced horticulturalist such as Montie, nor to a man as accustomed to overheads as Gary, but the afternoon was punctuated with cries of pain as they, and others, periodically walked into these ornaments.

Withyham also have an excellent scoreboard that works on the same principle as a calculator with each figure formed from seven bars that can be turned ‘on’ or ‘off’ (yellow side up or black side up) in combination to form any of the numbers 0 to 9. This also posed more problems to the Shoreham operators than one would have imagined. Perhaps this was because they were often mildly concussed.

‘Forty three for one off nine Montie’.

‘OK’

Bong

‘Bugger!’

‘Does this look like a four?’

The story of the game is simply told.

Ray anchored the first half of our innings. He was fourth out for 47, immediately after the drinks break, when the score was 98.

Paul played the anchor role for the second 20 overs, finishing 50 not out when our total was 208.

Other notable contributions came from Mick – 21, Gary – 32, and Russell, who hit a quick fire 15 when it was needed to push us over the 200 mark.

We only needed to use four bowlers. Russell opened and struck in his first over, courtesy of a diving, low slip catch by Chris. Five catchers quickly became six, and, with this field to bowl to, Russell took 4 wickets for 26 runs in 7 overs.

Gary replaced Russell and he ended with a magnificent 6 wickets for 7 runs from 2.5 overs. His most remarkable sequence went:

. wicket . dropped catch . dropped catch . wicket
wicket . dropped catch . dropped catch . wicket . wicket . dot ball

It is certainly the only time that this Hack has witnessed two different hatrick balls in the same over.

Nigel and Andre bowled very well and economically, but without reward, from the other end.

Withyham’s young side (the combined age of eight of their team was less than two of ours) bowled very well, but their batting wilted. In seasons to come they will no doubt mature into a formidable unit.

So, we followed our 20-over victory last week with a 19-over triumph this week, posted another score over 200 and took almost maximum points from the game.

- Wyn

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Posted on Wednesday, 24th June, 2009 in 2nds Match Reports.