U9A v Bedford

George hits out

George hits out

Bedford are a strong cricketing school, with former England batsman Derek Randall as head coach and Alastair Cook of Essex and England a recent pupil. They have a large pool of boys from which to draw each team, which means they are a very tough opposition to beat, and so it proved again today for the Under Nine A team.
In drizzle and poor light, BG won the toss and asked Bedford to bat. It proved to be the right decision as we took three wickets in the opening overs to put Bedford immediately on the back foot. They gradually clawed runs back but a much improved bowling performance from the home team and regular wickets kept the final total down to a manageable 282 (net) off 20 overs. Pick of our bowlers was William who took four wickets.  Notable also in an unobtrusive way was Oliver R, who as well as putting in a good perfomance as wicket-keeper (some excellent takes down the leg-side, which are often a good indication of a good keeper), made a quietly impressive debut as captain.

It was clear when we went into bat that Bedford weren’t going to offer us too many loose deliveries and indeed their accuracy meant scoring runs was hard. There were precious few loose balls to dispatch to the boundary, and they also were making the ball ‘perform’ in a way that our boys had not experienced before- some fine wicket-taking deliveries that pitched and came back in, and some very good spin bowling. When we tried to put them under pressure by running hard, their returns were hitting the stumps with only one to aim at- impressive fielding! Our last pair, Oliver and George, had it all to do, and I gave them the instructions at least to go down fighting, which they did- George getting twenty off one over, with two sixes, one of which gave the ball an impromptu bath in the boating pond!

Despite being eventually 50 runs short of the target, there was again much to be positive about, and I was particularly pleased that the team were complimented by the Bedford coach on their sporting attitude, in the way that they made appreciative comments of the opposition shots or bowling.

I had talked earlier in the week to the boys about the school motto, ‘iron sharpeneth iron’ and what it means in the context of playing strong opposition- the boys showed a good team spirit this afternoon and were certainly up for the challenge- it had seemed earlier that our captain had taken some Hogwarts ‘Felix Felicis’ potion as luck seemed to be on his side, but although the effects unfortunately wore off before the second innings, I’m confident that the team will register a victory before too long as everything -batting, bowling, fielding, luck- comes together and ‘clicks’ at the same time.
Many thanks as ever to the supporters’ club and to Mrs Jenkins who gamely took on the challenge of grappling with my camera to take some photos of the game- see the gallery here.

DRN

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Tags: Cricket, Juniors, Prep, Sport