Match Report vs Consmen 11 June 2009

On a fine Llanrumney evening, 11 Consmen and 9 Casuals (one was late and one was at Wenvoe!) turned up expecting to play a game of cricket, only to find that no pitch had been booked for us! The other quarter-finalists were there and booked in but not us. Although there was a spare pitch, it wasn’t prepared and they were never going to let us play on it. However, it turned out that there was another pitch marked out for a UWIC game – only UWIC weren’t there and neither were anyone else, so after a few phone calls, they said we could use the pitch as long as no one turned up by 6:30pm. So we hung around and chatted with the opposition who had some new, if familiar faces amongst them – familiar to me at least as I’ve umpired several of them in the South Wales Cricket League! I recognised 2 Radyr players (SWCL Divison 1) and Cefn Fforest’s best player (SWCL Div 2 last year, now Conference). Let’s just say they’ve recruited well.

And so the cricket. We eventually started at 6:30 and it least it meant our two missing players had arrived by then. I won the toss and put them in to bat as it’s difficult to know what a good score is in a cup game. Things started well enough with Andy H bowling two tight overs for 8 runs and Paul adding to his season’s tally of wickets taking 2 for 14. So far, so good. Mohamed replaced Andy and bowled well enough (0-13) but Manish (0-36), Shaky (0-25) and Doc (0-23) bowled a bit of a mixed bag and also had the misfortune of running into their ‘good’ players – all the bad balls were put away, but so were some of the good ones. After our early breakthroughs, 4 Consmen then went on to retire one after the other. JF (0-7) and JP were going to bowl 1 over each, but Pikey’s first over was excellent, so he was kept on and only conceded 7 runs in his two overs. Excellent stuff from the Pikester. Mahesh (0-15) and Kim (0-4 off his one over) finished off the innings and the Consmen had racked up 159-2 off their 18 overs.

Needing 9 an over from the outset was going to be tough but not impossible in a cup game where you can score big off teams’ lesser bowlers. Pablo & Manish got us off to a decent start, 32-0 off four overs, but then one of the Radyr players came on and took 3-7 in his two over burst: he had Manish (13) & BA (18) both bowled and had Goughy (1) caught off a skyer. That changed the complexion of the game somewhat! Even so, Kim accelerated his innings and retired on 28, and Doc & Pikey put on a few runs so we were still in the game needing about 70 from the last 7 overs. That’s when Jimmy Morgan (the Cefn Fforest lad) came on and pegged us right back. Pikey rightly tried to get after the bowling from the other end but was caught (11) going for the big shot and Matt D (16) scooped one up to the keeper off Morgan’s last ball. His two overs only went for 2 runs and a couple of leg byes and the asking rate jumped to 48 required off the last 3 overs. Shaky came and went for nought to a catch which was made to look much more difficult than it really was. This left the skipper and Mojam trying to smack every ball and mostly only succeeding in edging it or hitting it straight to the fielders. The innings fizzled out into something of an anti-climax, with JF & Mo both 10* and the Casz 130-6, 30 runs short of the victory target.

If you wanted to look for excuses, you could say that the league players made the difference - their 4 overs accounted for 4 wickets for 9 runs and they both retired with the bat. However, if we're honest we need to look at ourselves to find where it went wrong for us. We could still have won the game and the harsh truth is we just didn't bowl well enough. We simply bowled too many poor balls. If they score off good deliveries you just have to hold your hands up and say ‘well batted’, but we gave away 15 wides plus too many easy balls to hit – long hops, full tosses, balls on leg stump etc. I would have felt pretty confident chasing down 140 but we gave them 20-30 runs more than they should have had and ending up losing by 29 runs.

Ah well, there's always next year...

[Milestones]
The following Milestones were reached in this game. Congratulations to:
Matt Davies - 100 runs (at last!! - Well done Doc)

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