Scorecard

Knebworth Park IV v Totteridge Millhillians Cricket Club 4th XI on Sat 26 Jun 2010 at 1:00pm
Totteridge Millhillians Cricket Club Won by 8 wickets

Match report TMIV v. Knebworth Park IV
26/06/2010
Played at KP

There was something missing when this game was finished, I couldn’t put my finger on it for a while but then it dawned on me... there was a distinct lack of gut wrenching bile involved in watching us knock off the 213 runs required for victory. Normally at some point after a promising start there would be a monumental collapse followed by a rearguard action with the 4s scrapping home with one or two wickets in hand and many years knocked of the skipper’s life expectancy.

More on the batting side of things later. The opposition chose to have a bat after Chris continued his run of excellent/poor form with the coin toss (depending on your point of view re winning the toss). It was a hot day, the outfield was cut short with a short boundary on one side and the pitch looked hard despite a covering of green. Siva “Me Timbers” Sakthivel produced the opening breakthrough not long into proceedings, his pace managing to push their opener back and then getting one through the defences crashing into middle stump. Thankfully for Siva he had brought along his brother with camcorder (as you do) to film proceedings capturing his moment of glory. Their other opener looked handy and on a good pitch was no doubt expecting to hang around and cash in once the fielding side started to flag in the heat; so his fellow batsman did the decent thing and ran him out. Jeremy “Sargent Slaughter” Graves was steaming in from the other end and was finding a nice line complimenting Siva’s excellent spell at the other end beating the bat on numerous occasions. Unfortunately, as is the way with the 4s, the catching was not quite up to it and we shelled four chances to remove messrs 3 and 4, albeit none of the chance were straightforward ones. Having being handed a couple of lives the two bats went on to make 56 and 48 being particularly harsh on any width offered. The pitch was looking very true at this stage and so a policy of taking the pace off the ball was introduced giving the Sargent and the Pirate a chance to get their breath back. Sanjay bowled a brief spell without reward despite causing some problems for the batsman and Waqas had a longer stint and was rewarded with one of the more plumb LBW decisions you’ll see with the number 4 missing a sweep two short of his half-century. Steve replaced Sanjay and continued with his policy of minimal run up for maximum accuracy and was able to pick up 3 wickets, a mistimed drive to mid-off to get rid of the number 3 who had played well and later in the innings two in two with an excellent stumping by A-B followed next ball with the bat playing all round a swinging delivery. Chris picked up a wicket off a low full toss with Kamlesh catching well at mid-off. At the end of the innings and for the second time in as many years Chris called back a KP batsman after he was reliably informed in the final over that the bat who had just be caught stone dead in front and triggered had in fact hit the ball into his pads. Thanks to A-B’s superhero strength hearing behind the stumps the batsman was invited back to smash the last two balls of the innings for 4s and wrecking any chance of the captain emerging with reasonable figures. That’s gratitude for you. We fielded really well on a hot day despite a few drops and the occasional overthrow with "Shouty" Joe Coakley excelling himself in the deep.

213 to win on what appeared to be a really good pitch to bat on. Tea was ingested and then Kamlesh back after his mid-season break and the Sargent were charged with getting the show on the road. We started well with Jermey’s straight batting yin complimenting Kamlesh’s free flowing yang. After our good opening stand KP turned to their slow left arm bowler who had Kamlesh caught in the deep after making a decent 27 mainly in boundaries. This brought Rahul to the crease and was looking good after a shaky start before he too fell victim to the same bowler with a juggled catch taken well on the rope by KP’s skipper. Sanjay “Titanic” Patnaik was next in to the fray with loads of time to play himself in and have a look at the bowling attack. He took a solitary ball to acclimatise before mowing the second he faced to the rope. All the while Jeremy was playing a sensible game, accumulating away with the occasionally boundary. The running between the wickets was excellent with strong calling from the Sargent (in no way attributable to police background). Despite the captain ordering the remaining batting order to pad up “just in case” the partnership went on and on with both batsman passing their fifties. The opposition seemed to run out of ideas with a plethora of similar seam bowlers used without success having strangely removed the only bowler to take any wickets after one semi-expensive over. Despite the odd quiet over the run rate was never really an issue as both batsman scored regular boundaries (Sanjay employing minimal top hand in most of his). Sanjay finished off the chase in the 43rd over with three successive fours; Jeremy carried his bat for 79 and Sanjay not out on 75. Needless to say this was an exceptional batting performance from both guys with good support from the other chaps who got a bat. The impressive batting performance also put in perspective how well we fielded and bowled to contain the opposition to just over 200 runs, a good fifty short of what the needed even though we were going to be chasing with 6 less overs.

Though I pray for the contrary we may never see the likes of this in the 4s again, so we shall savour the day we chased without a collapse, Sanjay’s got a picture of the scoreboard should anyone question my integrity in reporting this.

Knebworth Park IV Batting
212 for 7
Player name Runs
B.Painter Run out  Benn 12
M.Turner Bowled  S.Sakthivel 0
C.Banser Caught  S.Lyall (Benn) 56
I.Pickering Lbw  W.Memon 48
I.Woods Caught  C.Benn (Bharadia) 24
P.Bayford Not Out  49
S.Reynolds Stumped  S.Lyall (Mathew) 6
G.Johnson Bowled  S.Lyall 0
J.Elliot Not Out  8
G.Jones  
R.Jones  

Totteridge Millhillians Cricket Club 4th XI Bowling

Player NameOversMaidensRunsWicketsAverageEconomy
Sivasankar Sakthivel9.0418118.002.00
Sanjay Patnaik5.002100.004.20
Waqas Memon10.0147147.004.70
Steve Lyall14.0143314.333.07
Chris Benn8.0053153.006.63
Jeremy Graves7.022000.002.86

Totteridge Millhillians Cricket Club 4th XI Batting
215 for 2
Player Name RunsCatchesStumpingsRun outs
Jeremy Graves Not Out  79
Kamlesh Bharadia Caught  27 1
Rahul Bhatnagar Caught  13
Sanjay Patnaik Not Out  75
Joe Coakley  
Abhilash Mathew   1
Chris Benn   1 1
Neil Dennison  
Sivasankar Sakthivel  
Waqas Memon  
Steve Lyall  

Knebworth Park IV Bowling

Player nameOversMaidensRunsWicketsAverageEconomy
G.Johnson8.303900.004.59
J.Elliot8.004200.005.25
S.Reynolds10.0226213.002.60
G.Jones6.013000.005.00
P.Bayford3.001900.006.33
I.Woods3.002100.007.00
B.Painter4.002200.005.50