Ballo’s mighty 4s finally turned out under their proper skipper for a game against Leicester 1s. Cryfield Lakeside looked like a great pitch with the only thing going for the bowlers being the wind, and that was only from the one end. After some imaginative flag placing ordered by the captain to even out the boundaries, Ballington won the toss and decided to have a bat. The skipper placed great faith in our batting line up, made mostly of players famed for other parts of their games, to set a defendable total. But considering that the HMS Bowen was in good batting form, the decision to set sail and bat was received with great anticipation by the rest of the troops.
Aneesh accompanied our skipper Ballo with the aim of seeing off Leicester’s inevitably one gun bowler and cash in later on the forthcoming filth. However Aneesh got trapped in front early doors to send Gemes out to the middle sooner than ideally planned. The “old head” and the skipper proceeded to score slowly whilst both dealt confidently with bouncers from one end and full tosses from the other. However, it was the latter of which that undid Seb for not many, much to the doom of a chair placed in his path to the pavilion. Some say it’s the cleanest he’s connected in his BUCs career. That brought Chappel to the crease to bat well around Ballington who started to find the boundary with promising regularity. After a flurry of attempted cut shots Chappel decided to play with a straight bat, which ended in the keeper-come-batsmen chipping one up the ring. Warwick 43-3. Our very own Lionel Messi, Dan Reed, than came out the join our skipper. Dan played himself in very sensibly, unlike his Bexon-esque hairstyle choices. However, it was our skipper who finally holed out to a spinner as he eyed up the straight boundary with the help of the wind. Although our skipper significantly improved his BUCs average, his very well played 34 wasn’t quite enough to paper over the damage already done to our top order by the Leicester attack. Warwick soon slumped to 67-5 after Dan missed a straight one.
The steady head and conservative nature from Rhys and Ash respectively helped to steady the ship, take the sting out of the game and make the bowlers work hard for any reward. Despite Ash spending a lot of time at the crease, Rhys managed to hit the occasional boundary to keep the scorers occupied. Ash finally got bowled to bring the man with the most BUCs experience to the crease, John Mark. Jean-Marc then proceeded to score off a run a ball to pick up the scoring rate before chipping one up to point. However that was only to bring the in-form, destructive Bowen to dispatch their spinners with a series of what can only be described as “straight sweeps”. Rhys finally departed on 37 to top score; an innings that truly anchored our batting effort. After some good death bowling from their returning openers Warwick finished on 159-9 off their 50, but more importantly Bozza scored a very handy 21* to propel his BUCs average towards Bradman-like standards.
After a cold and windy tea it was time to see Leicester’s reply, which didn’t last long for the wrong reasons from a Warwick perspective. Despite Manoj find the top edge to get rid of one their openers, the Leicester number 3 proceeded to dispatch our bowling attack to all corners of Lakeside. He scored a very dominant 77* to pretty much just win the game. Their other opener played his best golf shots off our spinners to get to 50 as Leicester made light work of the 159 runs that we had worked so hard to construct. They ran our total down in the 27th over to put the players in a great mood for another heavy Wednesday night, which (let’s be honest) is why we all play this great game.