The Indoor Bs enjoyed a nice team bonding evening out on the Friday before the match. As we chuffed the food down our burger holes we looked forward to the Sunday match against Bedford Pakistanis. As per usual, the team members were getting their excuses in early with a variety of trivial sounding problems like type 2 diabetes, bad tickers, knackered joints, incontinence (or was it incompetence?) amongst other things.

Mainly thanks to Thamslink a couple of the team members and the umpire got in in the very early hours of Sunday morning to add to the ailments that were outlined on Friday and as the previous game was running late there wasn’t time for a warmup as Jez lost the toss and we were asked to bowl. Kieran was our newest recruit today and we worked out that shockingly he was one third the age of Johnny Marsh. Jimmy started and found it tricky to find a good length, but a little bit of swing. Johnny started the other end and neither batsmen were troubled until the second over when Jimmy bowled his only straight ball of his spell and cleaned up the number 1. Hussain meanwhile continued to tuck into the bowling, as ravenously as Hax was scoffing green chillis on Friday night, and retired fairly early on. This lead to the second breakthrough as Singh was run out by ‘Stand-back Smith’. Usual readers of these match reports will be wondering how this could possibly have happened given that Smithy missed a runout from 6 inches away in the last but one match. Thankfully this time he had a pair of wicket keeping gloves on which clearly improved his throwing accuracy as he underarmed from about 6 foot away to complete the run out. By this time, Kieran and Ali came on. Kieran was very nagging with his accuracy and bowled Aslam as he tried to work him into the corner. At the other end, they couldn’t lay a bat on Ali. Not necessarily because he was bowling well but the swinging ball ended up going wide, which to be fair wasn’t as damaging to the score as normal with Stand Back rolling around and occasionally stopping the ball going to the back wall for an extra run. Would these small margins prove crucial? To be fair he wasn’t always successful, with one memorable effort as the ball dribbled slowly off the batsman’s pads into the corner, Stand Back ran after it, bent down to pick it up, but didn’t quite get down far enough and the ball rolled slowly into the wall. Kieran, the bowler, remarked that he couldn’t get angry as it was far too funny to watch. If you could imagine a really creaky old man bending down with great difficulty to pet a small dog, that was what it looked like to the team, who were obviously very sympathetic to Smithy’s plight. By this time Jimmy had tweaked his back and actually feels like that old man. He was able to struggle through his final over with Kieran taking the last over which although straight, we struggled to stop the hitting of Hussain who kept finding the back wall. Bedford Pakistanis ended up on an above par 171. Given our history of preferring not to chase, how would we get on?

Jez and Smithy opened and they adopted a steady start until Jez inevitably got frustrated and repeatedly and mostly successfully to be fair, assaulted the back wall, retiring fairly quickly. This was a great start and exactly what we needed. Smithy payed the anchor role and Ali came in with his usually aggressive intent, his highlight being possibly the slowest 6 I’ve seen for a while as he hit a leading edge, looping it back over the bowler’s head. After a quickly made 14 he was unlucky to be caught with a great one handed grab by Singh. Kieran came and went and Smithy retired too, in between Kieran wondering if it was possible to carry your bat indoors (ie not retiring). This bought in tail enders Jimmy and Johnny who had to continue the onslaught to keep up with the rate. And onslaught they did as some wild slashes and scythes were combined with decent shots to bring us close to the target. Jimmy retired (second best batsman in the league 2014-15 season) which gave Jez enough time to run himself out on the penultimate ball with 3 runs needed. Thankfully, cool heads prevailed and Smithy came back in and calmly caressed the ball for a 3 which won us the game off the final ball.

Well, what a game and it just shows that small margins count indoors. Thanks as always to umpire Passman, who in a first for an indoor umpire, stood with a woolly hat on for the entire game, Mike our scorer, braving illness to score for us and Sneathy, our spectator, who I imagine is still recovering from watching some of the quality cricket on offer. If anyone is stuck for Christmas present’s for Rich Smith I believe he is in the market for a grabber tool for the elderly. Just give it the the meals on wheels people and they will drop it off for him.