Theale and Tilehurst Friendly XI vs Bledlow 22nd September 2007

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Report by Fingers

The relatively long trip to Bledlow has become something of a T&T post season tradition; the matches have tended to be fairly high scoring and we have an unbeaten record on the ground to maintain. This match lived up to these traditions.

When the Bledlow captain, Adam Mould, won the toss he apparently smiled broadly and informed James that Bledlow would be batting first. He didn’t quite run back to the pavilion to put his pads on but he was obviously keen on getting in to the action as he came out to open the batting. When he despatched the first ball of the match to extra cover for four he must have been thinking he was in for a decent score. It was not to be though as a couple of balls later he went to a juggling catch by Sunil in the gully.

This brought Downes to the crease and as he had done the previous year he took an immediate liking to the T&T bowling; he was able to take advantage of the short leg side boundary when Bob was bowling and went to a very breezy fifty. With Williams playing a fine supporting role it looked like Downes might take Bledlow to a truly enormous total but in the process of going for one big shot too many he was clean bowled by Sunil.

As the first change bowler Indy bowled an excellent spell, bringing the scoring rate back under control and producing a couple of superb deliveries to dismiss Bacon and Keens; the ball that bowled Bacon coming back in a prodigious amount.

As the lower middle order started to fall away it seemed that the Bledlow total could be kept to fewer than 220 but just as we were thinking about bowling them out Maloney and Moore launched a severe counter attack. As it was the innings closed on the fall of the ninth wicket with the score on 256.

After an excellent tea Rog and Aygzz went out to open the T&T innings. I think it’s fair to say that one of the reasons both of them like opening the batting is that they prefer the ball coming on to the bat with a bit of pace on it. Whilst they got this from Moore the bowling of Linnell was not so much to their liking (for T&T members imagine Dave Harvey bowling on a day when he’s giving it a bit of extra flight and trying to take the pace off the ball).

Rog ended up tying himself in so many knots to the bowling of Linnell that he became incapable of moving when he was bowling. He ended up doing nothing to one ball other than watch it hit his stumps; either a misjudgement of line or a theory that the ball was travelling so slowly it wouldn’t dislodge the bails.

Sunil briefly threatened to launch as assault on Linnell before being bowled by Moore and at 68-4 we were looking distinctly second favourites. It was left to James and Harry to rebuild the innings with a partnership of 61 for the fifth wicket, James finally going soon after he passed fifty and after being involved in a second decent partnership with Rags Harry went for 27, his highest score in his fledgling career.

As time started to run out Rags launched an attack on the returning Linnell and threatened to put the game back in the balance. However, when he went for a quick fire 45 it was left to Tim and me to bat out the last four overs for a draw.

An excellent game was then followed by watching India beat Australia in the Twenty20 much to the pleasure of Rog, Sunil and Indy.