Wollaton 1st XI v W I Cavaliers
Wollaton Losing Draw

Saturday saw Wollaton’s annual trip down the road to Birchover Park.  Playing against the Cavs is always an interesting prospect not only in cricketing terms but on many other levels too.  

Vince won the toss and decided to bowl.  Colin and his young protégé Mick opened up.  Colin used tenacity and guile to steal the wicket of Aaron Thomas in his first over and proceeded to bowl tightly from there on in.  Mick decided to bowl half volleys, half volleys might I add that seemed a little too quick for the top order and resulted in the satisfying removal of Dominic Williamson (one of their more dangerous batsmen).

Having been 4-2 the Cavs recovered with a decent partnership and some friendly bowling from Savill senior.  Vince stemmed the flow from one end and brought Apollo into the mix from the other.  What followed seems to have been described many times in previous match reports so I will keep it simple.  Gerry bowled, batsmen cowered, Gerry dominated, batsmen wilted, Gerry took five wickets, batsmen had no answer, Gerry 1, Cavs 0.  

Mick cleared things up at the end leaving Wollaton 158 to get.

Wollaton got off to a decent start.  Ed didn’t trouble the scorers too much and allowed Steve Allcoat to join Karl in the middle.  Steve and Karl put together a decent partnership until an unfortunate event brought it to a close.  Steve firmly struck a delivery from one of their plethora of spinners straight back to the bowler.  The bowler proceeded to drop the catching opportunity, however he dropped the ball onto the stumps running out Karl at the non-strikers end.  A very unsatisfactory ending!

Wollaton didn’t really recover from Karl’s slice of bad luck.  The top order struggled to keep up with the run rate and became bogged down by good spin bowling.  A minor flourish from Mick towards the tail end of the innings provided a glimmer of hope, however a good catch from Williamson at cow corner saw the end of the Aussie and also Wollaton’s chances of winning the game.

It was left to Gerry and uni lad/playboy Ben Millar to block out the final few overs, handing Wollaton a less than satisfying losing draw.  

Wollaton host the Killer Martians next week.