Theale and Tilehurst Friendly XI vs Eversley 15th September 2007

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Report by Fingers

A T&T side that wasn’t as strong as it had been on paper in the middle of the week took to the field against Eversley; Meady electing to field on winning the toss.

According to the Eversley correspondent in the bar after the game, talking to one of his mates on the ‘phone, their openers went off like trains. And in this statement he was quite correct; in fact it looked like Eversley would rattle up something in the region of 300. The brake was only gently applied when Indy managed to clean bowl the hard hitting Dixon. Dixon had hit one very nice straight six off Bob although this did seem to be the subject of some dispute with some of the T&T players; Rog in particular pointing out that it had landed short of the flags. He was right in this but it had clearly landed over the boundary line marking off the sightscreen; presumably Rog thought that was just a stray piece of rope on the outfield for no reason.

The Eversley correspondent then went on to explain to his mate that the innings had changed when we brought on this “slow dibbly-dobbly” bowler. Not the most flattering description I’ve ever had in my career but certainly not the worst either.

Indeed taking the pace off the ball worked to good effect and wickets started to fall. Mission went as the first of Phil’s two stumpings and then Tom McKenzie (Prinn), more normally seen playing for Mortimer West End, was well caught by Rog at extra cover.

The Eversley innings collapsed to such an extent that the score went from 141-2 to 164-9. However, there was another twist in the innings to be played out. Slatcher coming in at number eleven after a brief look at the bowling started moving the score along at a pace with some clean hitting; to such an extent that my final over went for more runs than the nine that had preceded it put together.

An unbroken 50 partnership for the tenth wicket meant that the Eversley innings closed on 214-9; a score that was a lot lower than it had looked at one point, more than at another but probably in reality about 20 short of par.

After what was comfortably the best away tea of the season Rog and Eddie went out to open the T&T reply. Initially things started well as the score eased to 27 before events turned in the eighth over. Firstly Eddie went lbw and a couple of balls later Meady followed in the same fashion. When James went for a single in the tenth over realistic chances of us getting close to the Eversley total had probably gone.

Rog got some blows away, notably one large six over the car park off Sever (more normally seen playing for Crown Wood), before he too went playing one big shot too many. The T&T lower order fell away in the face of some good leg spin bowling from Ward; it was left to Phil to get the score past 100 as he was severe on one Slatcher over including one six over the pavilion.

It was noted afterwards that over the last couple of weeks there was the potential for there to have been two good matches between T&T and Eversley; the only problem was the wrong teams had played each other.

After the game several of the T&T players retired to one of the local pubs for the AGM of the T&TCC Gourmet Club; Bob coming dangerously close to having his membership rescinded by making a very modest impression on the enormous mixed grill that he ordered.