St James Seniors

Another match versus St James’s on another beautiful August afternoon for this magical annual fixture.  We were warmly welcomed to their beautiful ground by St James’s skipper Mike Edmunds and his team which slightly surprisingly contained our own Degsy!  Our team included two Martlet debutants, Steve Lovell and Ayan Chakravartty alongside many of the Martlet O40s stalwarts.  The format was agreed to be 30 overs, retire on 30 and Sunday rules for umpiring, which pleased the bowlers.  St James’s batted first and most of the Martlets team took the opportunity to bowl.  Wicketkeeper Steve Lovell took two scalps – a stumping and a run-out with some excellent sharpness which he maintained throughout.  The quality of the batting was high and the outfield was fast.  Our success as a catching unit was hampered slightly by skipper Dave Christmas continually moving us into the areas into which the catches would fall only a few metres left, right or short.  It was very close to being an incredibly successful example of visionary captaincy.  At the close we counted 7 “almost” catches as St James’s racked up 205 runs – their final runs coming from a first ball 6 by Mike Edmunds, coming in at number 11, to win a bet of a jug of Harveys on the last ball of the innings.Our own innings started poorly with Chairman Paul Walker skittled out by Degsy who seemed to be bowling with even more vim and vigour than he does when wearing Martlets colours!  Three of our batsman (Neil Bushell, Tom Whyte and Dave Christmas) retired at 30 and between them got more than half of our score which was within touching distance of the target in another exciting run chase.  Alas we fell just short and pondered on what might have been.A big thanks to Martlets Umpire Jim Lock and Martlets scorer Les Newcombe and to Alan Newman for his organisational skills.  This was another lovely fixture and a real pleasure to part of.