Theale & Tilehurst Friendly XI vs Crown Wood 5th June 2005

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Report by Fingers

The games against Crown Wood over previous years have followed a pretty similar pattern: we bat first and score plenty and they don’t get many in reply. On at least three occasions one of our batsmen has scored more than all of them put together. This fixture was nearly lost over the winter with both clubs recognising how uneven most of the games had been but was not as Crown Wood had merged with another club and promised stronger opposition.

When we arrived at the ground the opposition was clearly different from previous years. Before the game they went through a range of warm up exercises and were obviously taking the game very seriously. On winning the toss James decided to bowl first on what looked like an interesting surface. Trikha and Lodhi started the Crown Wood innings and in between quite a bit of playing and missing made their way to 28 before Lodhi was lbw to Rog. Rog had been introduced to the attack a bit earlier than he might have anticipated as Os seemed to have injured a groin muscle or something similar at the end of his fifth over. Now, I know they say injuries take longer to heal the older you get and that Os still counts as a youngster but having looked like he could hardly walk within five minutes he was back to running round like a lunatic. When Rags strained a calf later on when batting the injury hadn’t healed by the time we went home which perhaps suggests he is a bit older than he is letting on!

Bob had bowled an excellent spell without reward when James indicated to him that it was his last over. On Sundays one wicket isn’t always enough to keep you on so Bob took three to be on the safe side. Trikha was the first to go caught at slip before two batsman of limited ability were both clean bowled. If this was the four and five in the order then we wondered what might be left and even Meady was trying to catch the skipper’s eye for a bowl. Fortunately James resisted this tempting offer as the batting to come was much stronger.

Rog was keeping it tight and Gordon was also keeping it tight in his first bowl for the club. Gordon soon got his first wicket for the club when Trikha (Jnr) was lbw. On a pitch that was difficult to score on Crown Wood continued to apply for themselves against some good bowling but in their forty overs were only able to make it through to 99-8. Gordon showed good stamina to get through ten testing overs in his first bowl in quite a while.

Meady and Fingers opened the batting for T&T and found themselves up against two tidy opening bowlers and a vociferous fielding side. There are often teams who come out on to the field and are very vocal to start with but don’t keep it going, this was different as it didn’t seem to matter what the match situation was they kept it going and often congratulated themselves on the quality of the banter. The other thing that was clear was that they had something of an identity crises referring to themselves variously as Wild Ridings, Hurst and even occasionally Crown Wood.

Malhan in particular bowled well by it was Trikha (Jnr) who got the first wicket when Fingers was lbw to a ball that kept low. This prompted a bit of a middle order flurry of wickets as 31-0 became 49-5 and the runs had almost completely dried up. James and Rags then came together and coped with the situation presented in their own ways, James blocking out all of banter in the field and concentrating on his batting but Rags loving the banter and more than happy to join in whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Both batted very well against what continued to be useful bowling and what had seemed to be a testing proposition was being overcome. There was even an opportunity for Ed to get involved in the banter from the pavilion by getting Rags to run hard for a three or four even though the ball had already crossed the boundary.

The winning margin of five wickets with 12 overs to spare suggests that we won the game comfortably but there wasn’t the gap between the teams that there has been in previous years.

After the game both teams then entered the post match stage. For Crown Wood this involved a full warm down routine on the outfield complete with stretching exercises. For T&T this involved getting in to the bar and eating the left over pies from tea. I know which is recommended but the question remains: who won?