On the 72nd anniversary of D-Day, the Cooks travelled to Birchfield Road to face the usually strong Saints U13s. It turned out it became something of our own D-Day by the end!
Due to the traffic difficulties, probably brought about by the expected large crowd, Saints only had 5 players at 6pm, so they were invited to bat first to get things underway. Even the Barmy Army arrived late with their fish and chip supper.
Keelan and Jake settled into a nice rhythm and Jake struck twice to reduce Saints to 19-2. A notable good catch at Point by Oliver Woolley the highlight of our early fielding, which was very pleasing given all of the practice on our catching the previous Friday evening.
Skipper Alfie rotated the bowlers well and Saints No’s 3 and 4 batsmen were not able to run away with the score, but they did hit the ball very hard on anything loose. After Liam struck twice in the same over, with some cracking line and length bowling, Saints were 54-4 off 12 overs and optimism was rising.
However, the Saints more experienced middle order continued to find their form and began to hit the ball hard and far and took their final score up to 119-4 from 20 overs.
I have to say the team bowled and fielded superbly as a unit against a much more experienced team and they were a credit to the club how they stuck with it to the end of the innings. All of the lads fielded well, concentrated hard, backed up well and gave their all.
The second innings proved a real learning experience for a number of the team. Skipper Alfie and Sam found it difficult to score against the accuracy of the Saints opening bowlers who made regular in-roads with early wickets from which we would never recover. Ollie Woolley and Sam Tipler did really well to notch a joint top score of 6, and it was good to see the two youngsters of Liam and Aidan batting with good techniques in the middle order.
Going back to the start and our own D-Day, it really stood for DUCK today as five of the lads were dismissed for ducks, four of them of the golden variety. We’ve all played games of cricket where early wickets see a collapse which can be hard to arrest and that is what happened last night. This is something we will learn from to try and make sure it doesn’t happen again. The winning margin was irrelevant in the end [92 runs for those that are interested].
Overall, I was proud of the way the team approached the game, it was good to see so many parents there watching, plus the club Chairman who was impressed with all of the boys. The Saints coach was also full of praise for the bowling and fielding of the team.
Thanks to Charlie for umpiring and Ben for scoring as usual. The U13s next match is on Monday 13th June at Cogenhoe against ONs A.