U15s cup game at St Margeretsbury

A difficult game at St Margeretsbury this morning. We lost the toss and were put into bat on a wicket that was on the sloppy side of soft. For the first 8-10 overs the pitch was very difficult to bat on with the ball behaving very weirdly for the bowlers. This was very telling and we lost several of our key batsmen very cheaply. Matthew L spooned up an easy catch for the first wicket off a ball that just didn’t behave as he would have expected. A similar pattern followed with Tegid T and Jake A falling very quickly after. A couple of risky decisions saw Damien D and Will D run out and we were in a very precarious position at 5 wickets down with a very low number on the board.
As the pitch dried out our middle and late order led by Will H batted respectably pushing the run rate up significantly, and we saw some big boundaries including 6s for James P and Will S. Overall though our batting struggled and the top scorer in our innings was the extras. At 117 all out after 19 overs (first time this group of boys has been all out) it was probably a bit short of a defendable target with the sun having now dried the wicket out significantly.

James P and Freddie H opened the bowling and kept it tight in the opening few overs and with two good wickets from Freddie, the opposition were at 12-2 and we looked like we were in with a shout. From there, opener Flynn, who has so often been our nemesis, dug in and made steady runs accompanied by their wicketkeeper.
Our bowling was mixed as was our fielding, and the opposition just played the right shots to the right balls and moved very steadily towards victory. A superb run out by Alex off his own bowing gave us a glimmer towards the end but eventually they got the required runs with an over to spare.

There really isn’t much between us and St Margs but on the day they outplayed us and had a huge advantage with winning the toss. Extras were probably the winner on a day when we didn’t quite perform at our very best.