“We’ve been given the end strip again. Just look at that short boundary,” he grumbled, to no-one in particular, or rather, no-one at all, as most of the team were still some miles away, near London.
“We’ll have to re-use yesterday’s pitch, like we did last week,” he informed a bored squirrel, who nonetheless paused mid nut, and raised a furry eyebrow as if to say, “I know your game – you’ll try anything to get your leggies to turn.”
So alone, save for the wildlife, the Skipper began to push stumps into the parched earth. Sighing the heavy sigh of captaincy, he completed one set and trudged, head bowed, to the other end to begin to construct another.
But there a rogue pebble brought his enterprise sharply to a halt. The Skipper must have spent half an hour trying like some cricketing Sisyphus to roll a stone out of a stump hole. Nothing could force it to move.
In exasperation, he finally fell to his knees, cursing his luck, and accepted that he would have to bowl on a pristine wicket, with a microscopic leg-side boundary. “This, surely, will be the graveyard of legspin as an art form in the modern game,” he sighed.
As in so many things, the Skipper was half right.
In fact, the short boundary proved completely irrelevant once the match got under way.
Despite a tidy opening spell from Lord Rashbrooke and Test Match Tim, which reduced BK to about 60-4, the batsmen soon found the bowling to be irreproachably hospitable and the outfield quick.
Runs piled up faster than Tim Moynihan’s plate during tea as two of our oldest BK friends helped themselves to a pair of 50s. Wicket keeper Pete eventually departed, stumped by his opposite number Jack off the Skipper’s bowling, but not before crashing several flighted deliveries to the ropes. BK’s very own Selfish Simon, however, went on to make a brilliant hundred and finished unbeaten on 103.
It was his first innings since 2007 and he looked like a man who had been starved of full tosses and longhops for far too long. We were, perhaps, a little too ready to oblige in putting that right.
The Cincers fielding was little better than the bowling. Test Match reminded the watching parakeets why his original nickname was Lurpak by buttering a catch to his left at slip and other chances went begging as the ineptitude spread.
But first prize went to one mesmerizing moment of paralysis where the Ross brothers nominated each other to field a looping catch off the Skipper’s bowling (“No, I insist, it really is all yours old thing”… “But I simply couldn’t, dear chap – after you” etc). Predictably it fell to the ground between them, quite an achievement given that one was at slip and the other keeping wicket.
BK finished with an imposing 255-7.
Tea was a magnificent affair of firey pasta, fresh cherries and gourmet sandwiches courtesy of the vice-skip, and augmented by a tray of Amy’s brownies.
What followed on the pitch, though, was stomach churning.
Despite a strong batting line up, even without our Selfish Simon, Cincinnati wilted under the pressure to achieve such a huge target.
Taking their queue from the Skipper’s earlier trouble with the stumps, every man in the side became inexplicably obsessed with woodwork. Nine out of 10 ‘Nati batters were bowled. The other, Steve - always one for doing his own thing - trod on his stumps instead.
By the end of the innings the wood at both ends had taken a fearful hammering and Cincinnati were all out for just half the BK score.
If only we'd used that other strip...
BK 255-7. Simon 103*, Pete 60. T Ross 3-28, Lord Rashbrooke 1-27.
CCC 134 all out. Tom 21, Ash 21. Rasheed 2-12, Josh 2-19.
Result: Lost by 121 runs.
CCC 134 all out. Tom 21, Ash 21. Rasheed 2-12, Josh 2-19.
Result: Lost by 121 runs.
