A Chairy End to a Miserable Performance

Dingy Bags summarises another comprehensive defeat for Middx.  He does report on an innappropriate raffle prize and the main highlight the chair stacking. also we introduce a porentlal new opener.

The Uxbridge festival came to its end tonight with a brilliant team effort, as a group of volunteers circled the ground stacking the chairs that had to go back on Saturday morning. Seaxe Man opened the stacking from the ski slope end and a great spell of outfielding followed that saw the job done in about twenty minutes. Diamond did a fine wicket-keeping job, tidying up, and the whole team was brilliantly captained by Vic.

It was just a shame about the cricket.

Briefly, we got our best start – 51-1 at the end of the powerplay – in the competition to date which was actually one run more than Hants managed in their first six overs. Rossington, in particular, was scoring quickly at this stage, until he seemed to change his mind mid-shot and was bowled by our old nemesis, Mascarenhas. But we don’t seem to play slow bowling particularly well and Hants, of course, have two excellent wrist spinners. Sure enough, from 61-1, we were 68-5 in no time and the game was all but over. When you watch Afridi from side on, you realise just how quick his fast ball is. Plenty of county seamers bowl at that speed. Sam Robson appearing late in both the competition and the innings brought a bit of respectability to the thing but we never had nearly enough.

In fact, we did well to keep up our performance to prolong the Hants reply until the end of the seventeenth over. The bowling figures look pretty good, out of context of the score being chased. Finn and Crook put in pretty quick spells and Hants rather dawdled to their total. The last half hour of the match was spectacularly unexciting and Afridi wasn’t called upon to smash the ball onto the common.

I also witneesed a Middlesex star of the future practising.

Middx no. 1, Middx Middx no. 1

At least there was momentous news of the raffle results. Vic, despite being tired at the end of an eight day festival that must seem to him about a month long, positively sprinted around the boundary to inform everyone that Kev had won a spell of membership at a local gym. Oh how we laughed! In fact, we laughed so much that we almost failed to notice Jeff Coleman walking off with three prizes (none of which he claimed to be his).

So, that’s Uxbridge for another year. An enormous thank you has to go to Vic and Ram for all their hard work and here’s to next year’s festival.

Can someone now turn T20 off so that we can get back to championship cricket?