Welcome To the New Forest Cricket Tardis

I like the New Forest, I go there camping, and walking. It is lovely, some parts giving off a proper ‘forest’ vibe, some more heath land. Some beautiful panoramas. A lovely place to visit, apart from the inconvenience of gangs of out of control gangsta ponies roaming around doing whatever the faq they please, causing trouble and disrespecting everyone they come across. But being a forest, it has a very low population density. That is one of the reasons why it is a great place to spend some time in. It does however have a shit ton of cricket clubs, many of them with multiple teams. At the last national census, it was calculated that there were more cricket clubs in the New Forest than people.

Burley High Street 9PM on a Saturday night

But it was to the New Forest we went – namely playing Bashley and Rydell High School Cricketing 11 (go the T-Birds!). I did not actually play in this match, was busy that day. You may think that this would cause me some problems trying to do a write up of the game, and you would be right. But not for the reason you are thinking. Doing a blog post about a game of cricket that I did not see is really not a problem. If I can see the score card and have a chat to someone that was there half of that problem is solved. When you put this together with the fact that I have a fertile imagination, no qualms about making stuff up and no actual interest in giving a factual recount of the game in question you can see that this is no real problem at all.

No, the problem I was mulling over last Saturday was far more fundamental. If my team won and I did not play, indeed was not even present on the day, how could I claim credit for the victory? You see, quite a tricky one eh? It’s not impossible, as if you are one of the er, 10s of people that was reading this nonsense last year, you will know that I managed to claim credit for the victory v Lymington in which I did not play. But it does take me an even more than usual willingness to ignore facts, accurate reporting and sense of decency to pull it off. Happily for me though, my team managed to lose, even without the handicap of me playing so all that worry was wasted. All that really remains is for me to give my team its post game talk reflecting on the defeat, so here goes –

“You should all be ashamed of yourselves, you let yourself down, your parents down and most of all you let me down. You all should go home and think about the pathetic way you have embarrassed me today”.  

You may be asking yourself why I would mention the players letting their parents down in an adult match. This is because I first used this speech several years ago when the U9 girls team that I was managing first lost and it had such a powerful effect then I see no reason to change it now.

How did we lose? Well, the openers managed to start well, getting to well over 50 before the first wicket fell. The rest of the team then decided to show a misguided sense of solidarity with their opening bats by all getting out in quick succession. Ah, what cha gunna do? It happens sometimes. Any bright points, well a good opening stand, obviously. Bowling wise, Alex Leach opened the bowling and only went for 7 runs in 5 overs, which is a commendable effort. Champagne moment? That is awarded in a completely different game – see below.

 Match Scorecard

Winton Round Up

The 1s managed to maintain their consistent start to the season by coming second again – remember guys, you are letting yourselves and your parents down…..

The 2s and 4s both maintained their 100% start to the season, which is nice and the 3s posted their first win as well.

 

HCL Div 6(a)

Well, the main game I would pick out here is Lymington 4s. v Mudeford 3s. Despite winning their first 2 games of the season Lymington conspired to get themselves bowled out for 29. Probably wasn’t the pitch as Mudeford had already posted 230. My guess would be a good bowling performance allied to a ‘one of those days’ for Lymington. The Champagne award this week therefore goes to Carl Turner for a stellar bowling performance with figures of 6/5/5/7. Well played sir. Now, we are playing Lymington next weekend, so if they could put in another ‘one of those days’ that would be great! How likely is that though…….