Teddington Club XI vs Brondesbury 4th XI

Date: 30th May, 2021

Venue: Bushy Park (top square)

A reasonable contest in a friendly between us and Brondesbury saw us lose by 7 wickets.

Sent into bat, slow and modest contributions from our top four got us to a worrying 83-5 (after being just over 50 at drinks - around 2.2 an over!), before a partnership between me (21) and Ben Mosey managed to add another 65 to to the total before Ben was out for a top score of 38 (his highest for a senior team), with the score on 148-6. A few runs off the remaining overs managed to get us to 165-7 off our 40 overs, which looked like it was unlikely to be enough.

So it proved when Brondesbury (who apparently were able to field six sides that day!) came out to bat and chased it down inside 23 overs for the loss of only 3 wickets, their No.4 ending unbeaten on 57.

Still winning isn’t really the objective behind arranging these games - it’s more about allowing some of our younger players to gain some experience of senior cricket in a friendly and largely non-competitive environment - today, for example, there was a senior debut for Ryan Weerasooriya.

Author: Matt O’Toole

Scorecard

Teddington Club XI vs Twickenham Sunday Club XI

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

Scorecard