The Cookie monster eats up Northwood!

What a wonderful day to play cricket! Lovely hot sunshine and blue skies as we welcomed Northwood CC to Rickmansworth.
Maz Shah went out for the toss and won after having a think for 0.1 seconds decided to bat on what looked a decent strip.
Maz and the teams leading scorer Taz Shehabi opened and got off to there usual "let me entertain you" start.
Maz in particular hitting the ball to the boundary while Taz got himself set. Maz was first to go for an entertaining 27 but getting bowled (which is a rare occurrence) Taz was joined at the crease by the steady Shami who looked in good form and took his time while Taz carried on his merry way to yet another 50!
Taz has now gone past 400 runs at the halfway mark for the season, he was dismissed for 57 to a LBW decision.
We then had the young Tahir Hussain and Toqeer Hussain both dismissed cheaply which is a real shame as they both highly talented, hopefully they will be firing on all cylinders next week!
Ibrar Hanif joined Shambo at the wicket and looked very good at the crease until he played on for 11, Majid came to the crease and as his style blasted the first ball for a six! second ball for a four and was very unlucky to be out third ball as he got a leading edge or we could have seen some serious fireworks.
The fall of wickets did not disturb shami's concentration as he kept accumulating his way to a well made 50 and putting on a decent partnership with young Adeel who was looking good out in the middle for his 16 runs, we were looking at maybe 220 but cookie had other ideas as he strode to the crease determined to show everyone that he deserves to bat higher up the order.

He played some sensible strokes as well as power hitting with five 4's on his way to 37 runs and pushing us to 250, shami had worked his way to 67 runs which included eight 4's and a maximum! brett and zaf pushed us to a team best score of 287 which we felt was more than enough...

Northwood started really well but were helped by unusual Ricky wayward bowling from Majid and Toqeer, Northwood raced to 50 off 5 overs before Majid hit his lines and had the opener caught behind, Toqeer was not enjoying his end so we brought on young Tahir who took a wicket with his first ball by bowling the other opener!
Then came on the spin twins cookie and Zaf as they have all season they slow down the run rate and take wickets, cookie in particular was looking dangerous with the ball turning and bouncing and taking two quick wickets, zaf on the other end dried up all the runs... so on came Brett the hit man Harvey, who settled in and bowled 8 overs 1-21. He is still not at his best but those figures show that like Dale Steyn he is getting there slowly.

Cookie carried on eating up the oppo by finishing on 5-25 off his 7 , zaf being very miserly 7 overs and giving 12 runs.

Northwood finished on 183 handing Ricky their 5th straight win

Skipper Maz Shah said afterwards " very clinical performance from the team, great to see the batsman score runs and the bowlers do their job especially cookie. I believe that I have the best team in this division and I expect them to get better in the 2nd half of the season, there should be some real explosive individual performances in the coming weeks as a few have not fired yet...."