Cricket Victory by Two Runs

 

Coming into our fourth match of the season we had won one, lost one and our home match against St Peter’s was cancelled owing to rain.

 

We always look forward to playing our friends from St Peter’s.  Many of both sides have been in these matches for nearly 30 years!

 

We had three new players this week, Francis, Roberto and Justin and one new supporter Michelle who took the photo after the match.  Enrico is our captain and also the OLSD Ministry Lead for Diversity and Culture and we have been encouraging anyone with an interest in cricket to join us.  Francis and Justin hail from India and Roberto from South Africa.  

 

This week’s match was dominated by the bowlers – OLSD won the toss and batted first but none of our batters was really able to score freely against some accurate bowling.   Regular fall of wickets meant at least that all of our players got to bat.  Top scorer was Robbie who managed 21 runs helping us to a modest total of 87 all out.

 

OLSD also bowled well and at no point was either side clearly winning.  Francis, having already batted well for 13 runs, volunteered to keep wicket and did a great job keeping things tidy behind the stumps.  Mark L generated the most excitement by taking a hat-trick, bowling out two batters with successive balls and trapping the next batter LBW – three wickets in three balls! None of us could remember this happening before in one of these matches.  

 

Tension mounted and we could hear Michelle cheering us on from the boundary.   One St Peter’s player threatened to win the game single-handed with a few lusty blows and suddenly there were under 10 to score with still around 18 balls left.  Some super fielding from our new players kept things tight and our ‘death bowler’ Enrico managed to take the last wickets and St Peter’s were short by two runs with four balls left. Every single player made a contribution.

 

Our matches are always played in a great sporting spirit and we were even able to resolve confusion about how many overs were bowled by St Peter’s very amicably.

 

Handshakes all round at the end and most of us were able to discuss performances – especially Mark’s hat-trick – in the Prince of Wales pub garden after the game.