Concorde v London Theatres

Match Report

THEATRES BRING DOWN THE CURTAIN ON OUR MOST DIFFICULT SEASON

Last Sunday saw us complete a truncated season, where we ultimately only fulfilled six of the scheduled fixtures.

We traditionally always regarded the final game against London Theatres as one of our best fixtures and tried very hard to field our strongest possible team, but this year the bulk of our ‘hard core’ were unavailable for various reasons and we sadly ended up with a very inexperienced line up of 10 players, including 18 year old Rhys & 15 year old James Briley, which then became only 9 when one member inexplicably failed to turn up despite having been in touch with me on the morning to check if we had 10 or 11 men!

However, in true theatre tradition, we naturally decided ‘the show must go on’ and the visitors elected to bat on winning the toss. I acquainted visiting skipper and the new ‘Phantom of the Opera’, Dean Chisnall, of our lack of strength and he promptly demoted himself and Michael Waugh to nos. 5 & 6 in the batting order, and sent in the ‘understudies’ as the first 4 batsmen. Last time out they plundered our attack for 286-1, when we had a much better bowling side, so on this occasion, ultimately restricting them to 245-3, seemed an improvement. On a very slow low pitch, we actually kept things fairly tight for the first hour or so, with Ash the pick of the bowlers, but we didn’t help our cause with at least 3-4 very take-able catches going down. As the pitch began to dry out and the quality of the batters got better as the wickets fell, the score then rapidly accelerated as Nick Couzens & Dean C. decided to get to the pitch and hit cleanly through the ball, mostly straight down the ground. Dean clearly found ‘facing the music’ of our bowling rather easier than the ‘Music of the night’ he faces six nights a week and he made a rapid 59 n.o. with Nick Couzens 67 n.o. with Nick W. and Freddie Cotterell suffering the brunt of the onslaught in the last few overs before tea.
Bowling figs: Ash W. 7-0-22-1, Rhys M. 6-0-39-0, James B. 6-0-40-0, Ian C. 7-0-39-1, Nick W. 4-0-60-1, and Freddy C. 2-0-42-0.

The excellent tea from Georgina Briley turned out to be arguably our best performance of the afternoon.

We were realistically never in the hunt and true to form veteran Duncan Waugh opened up from the pavilion end with his metronomic line & length, never short enough to pull or full enough to drive, supported by from the
Mansion end, by Kane, who ultimately bowled 8 overs for 10 runs. In the absence of any of our regular openers Ash & Richard Ingham opened and neither really looked in any trouble but after 7 overs had yielded only 5 runs, Richard lost patience and in attempting to force it, chipped an easy catch off Duncan Waugh to wide mid on. Nick Wright joined Ash as our main hope of a respectable score but it really wasn’t his pitch, with no pace, no bounce and the ball not coming on, and after a couple of singles he unluckily played on off the inside edge to give Duncan his second wicket and we were 14-2. Ash and Rhys tried a spirited response and for about 20 mins we started to make some progress but with the score on 36 the young replacement bowler from the Mansion end suddenly found the one ball of the match to bounce a bit and Ash gloved it to the keeper to depart for a gutsy 27. The rest is almost too painful to report as we contrived to lose our remaining 5 wkts for just 13 runs, with Freddy, Nigel, and young James all bowled for 0, Nick was lbw to a ‘shooter’ which hardly got above ankle height, and finally Rhys played across a straight one to be bowled for 9, leaving the writer 0*. I haven’t dared to look at the club records to see if we have ever been all out for less but it was certainly our second highest margin of defeat by 196 runs!

Ash had a decent day with bat & ball, but nobody else went home feeling too happy with their afternoon and it was a rather sad end to a frustrating season.