THURSDAY, 30 JUNE vs CONGRESBURY at BLAGDON
Blagdon 206-8, Congresbury 205-12 - Won by 1 run


What an exciting match. Throughout the day we had rain and many discussions with Fid about whether the match could be played at all. Then the sun came out and we started at 6.15pm. Tom, back as captain, won the toss and elected to field first. We only had 9 players and 7-year old Zoë Strong stepped in from the KWIK cricketers and performed well. Our bowlers tore into their batsmen and we kept them at about 200 runs for most of the innings. Towards the end they gathered a few runs and Tom came on for a second spell and blasted 3 wickets in one over to finish on 4 for 2 off 4 overs. Gabriel Westaway, playing his first match, took the penultimate over and also had 3 wickets with his stylish bowling action confusing the batsmen. They finished on 205 for 12.

Whilst their score looked meagre, it was still good enough for most of our innings. Our batsmen were giving away too many wickets on the soft pitch and the going was slow and difficult. Gabriel batted twice because Zoë had to go off to bed and Tom and Martin finished the innings. Luckily they ran very well between the wickets and got our score back above 200. Going into the final over Tom took a quick single to grab the strike. Despite the sensible advice from his partner to block out the remaining balls Tom was clearly reading the scoreboard. On the final ball we had 212 and Tom bashed the ball into the air. Instead of the 4 he was looking for, he was caught out and, phew, we were still 1 run ahead.

Overall, a really lovely game with plenty of drama and something for the lads to talk about in the years to come.