Debutante’s Ball Game

In a bright sign for the season Rickmansworth III’s turned up with thirteen players. After having three teams drop out during the week it was good to have an opposition in the form of Hatfield & Crusaders III’s, who offered a place to Atul Patel, making it a twelve-a-side game. Atul bowled well for Hatfield and in a radical change of policy from last year refrained from firing out the opposition in his stint as umpire.

Not all of last year’s habits are so easy to shake with Rickmansworth maintaining its long tradition of top and middle order batting collapses. However, Tom Warrell (78), playing his first game from Rickmansworth, and extras helped to provide some respectability. Alex Lee (7) and Rushil Sharma (13) making sure that Tom was not left stranded.

But while Rickmansworth’s batting looked as fragile as Pieterson’s ego it was all change in the field. Three colts, Alex Lee, Joe Monk and Scot Jackson made their senior debuts with some excellent ground fielding. Prompting even the old warhorses, Jon Wood, Tony MacDonald-Barker, Ken Brown, Ray Hibbert and Gajan Rudrakumas, into throwing themselves around on the field. Although, they regained their feet a lot slower and with a lot more groaning.

With some tight opening bowling from Hunuman Nallapati (5-1-12-0) and Sean Lindsay (5-1-7-2) Hatfield’s openers were somewhat restricted. While in their opening senior spells Joe (5-0-14-0), Alex (5-0-22-3) and Scot (5-2-12-2) make good inroads into the middle order. One more wicket would have opened the game up but with some dropped catches (an all too common occurrence) and some sensible batting (almost unheard of on Park Road’s top pitch) Hatfield got home with a couple of overs to spare.

The game was played in a great spirit by both teams, with good contributions all round , in bright sunshine and in a wind that could snap your deep long off.