World Tour, Match One

As they’re in this country, and had time on their hands in the evening, the first match in our world tour was against the West Indies.

We played them in a limited over match – 30 overs a side.

I won the toss, and decided to bat.

Richard and I made a good start, and I was just looking forward to reaching my half-century when I lazily lobbed the ball straight back to the bowler.

The rest of you played very well, and aggressively, with plenty of 6’s being hit. Hitting the ball in the air did, unfortunately, also give plenty of catches. Some of our older players misjudged their running ability, and caused run-outs. Nevertheless, I was very satisfied with our score of 218-10.

Although ILTV still keeps the score in the book, Ziggi now has an electronic score-board to display the results, and as the match was also televised, I took photos from the TV, rather than the book. Here’s our score-card then (the white figures are the runs each batsperson scored, the yellow is how many balls it took to reach that score – some of you, you will note, scored quite quickly). Oh, and the computer needed a first and last name for each of you – where I don’t know it, I’ve put ‘Blogger’ as your first name – hence ‘B. Tom’ appears, for instance.

The object, in limited overs cricket, is not to bowl the opposition out, just stop them scoring more than you, so economy, rather than aggression, was our watchword.

I let the rest of you bowl before me (partly because their openers were both lefthanders, and I don’t like bowling to them [I have to bowl around the wicket]). Eventually, though, I did have to take my turn – and got two lefties out (both of them, as it happens, players with of some repute).

The rest of you held things together very well (although a lot of catches were dropped – three of them, annoyingly, off my bowling). They finished on 157-5 at the end of their 30 overs – so we won by 61 runs.

Their batting and our bowling figures follow.