The 2nd team took a trip to Horley on Saturday with spirits high after a very strong team performance the week before. With the added bonus of our first 50/50 game to be played on a small ground , and a good looking team ( but not so much figuratively) our expectations were to go out and get a strong result .
Captain Woods had spent the best part of the week intending to win the toss and bat ! However upon our arrival at the ground and seeing a strip even greener than our training shirts and some of there players still working on it , he had a change of heart , all be it with a few words in his ear from some of his team . After another good warm up managed by Jag , the team took to the field raring to go.
Airey and Spilsbury opened up the attack with the latter finding it a little hard to get a consistent line running into a headwind however he did get a couple caught at slip well by Charan . The Horley side continued to bat as they always do , in an attacking way with some big hitting(small boundaries) including some maximums off Free hits, wickets did come our way throughout our overs with 2 each for Airey , Charan and Meardon and 1 for Pravdeep who bowled his best spell of the year so far. Good to see. Spilsbury took another for a 3 for … But with all our efforts the total to be chased down was higher than we wanted. 314 off 47.4.
The good news at half time was that heads didn’t go down. The openers Jag and Ben Ling went to the middle in a good positive frame of mind , only for Jag to fall quickly to a freak stumping . Not the ideal start Ling and new bat Woods steadied things down with Ling finding the boundary regularly and looking in good touch .
Woods fell. Caught on 21 and unfortunately wickets kept falling at far too regular intervals from then on, leaving Ling at the other end , He was caught for 88 after a couple of hours which left the rest of the team trying to add any runs they could get ,to maximise any batting points on offer.
Roberts hit a very well crafted 47 at this stage , but his teammates could not stay with him leaving him to hole out trying to add more runs to our under par score . We ended our innings with 192. Positives can be taken from the game along with 14 very valuable bonus points. On to a home game against East Oxford this week , sure that we will put in a good all round Team performance. Lesson of the day.
Never judge a book (Track) by its cover (colour) !!