Date: 25th April, 2021
Venue: Bushy Park (top square)
Twickenham agreed to a pre-season friendly with us at Bushy Park and were meant to send over a 4th XI standard team. However, it turned out later than their captain (Ethan Wright) played in Twickenham’s 1s or 2s and had been roped into captaining the side quite late on in the week. His involvement ended up making a significant contribution to them inflicting a close defeat on us as we made a credible effort, despite the gap in ability between the two sides.
Twickenham won the toss and decided to bat. They didn’t really look phased that much by our bowling attack and cruised to posting a daunting total of 238/4 off their 35 overs.
In response, I decided to shuffle the order around a bit and sent Bilal Siddiqui in to open with Dilan. Unfortunately, Bilal was quickly cleaned up before Dilan (27) and Shirsh Bedi managed to rebuild the innings somewhat to get us to 74-2 before Dilan was adjudged out LBW. The core of our innings then came from the 76 run partnership Shirsh managed to established with Eddie Clark, before Eddie was out for a decent 30 off 33 balls. Shirsh was eventually out for 89 (off 81 with 12 x 4s) with the score on 177-5. Some late thrashing and scurrying from Jon Kindon and Tom Cooper helped us to eventually post a reasonably credible total of 231, falling just short of the total by 7 runs, with 5 balls left in the innings. It was noticeable that when we were within sight of the target, Ethan decided to switch from bowling spin to bowling fast, seam-up. 🤨 He ended up with 5-45 off just 6.1 overs.
So we almost got there, despite the dodgy inclusion of some obvious Twickenham “ringers”. A credible effort from all.
Author: Matt O’Toole