Basically, we were brutalised
Police Grounds, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 3/4/2016
Matale Hindu College Old Boys won by 4 wickets
Strongroom: 195-7 [M.Nicholson 60]
Matale Hindu College Old Boys: 199-6 [Kishan 64, Pradeep 47]
View the Scorecard
It was with some fatigue that we arrived in our convoy of tuk-tuk’s for our second successive fixture at the Asgiriya Police Grounds. This time David P and Guy had to sit out - David’s hand had ballooned from swelling, and Guy’s wrist was playing up. Guy promptly walked up the hill to inspect the huge Buddha statue and to access some Zen. Grant was also carrying a strain, and so opted to bat but not bowl.
Stand-in skipper Jon G won the toss and batted first. Matale Hindu College’s two opening bowlers were very quick, and Jon’s first two balls clanked off his helmet, but we negotiated the short stuff and started to go about scoring runs. Mitch (60) and Jon (31) put on 81 in 16 overs, and one shot of Mitch’s in particular stood out - a very late upper-cut of a short rising delivery that whizzed past his nose, helping it on it’s way high over first slip and to the boundary for four. This was an extremely promising partnership, full of promise. However, once again we subsided disappointingly. Although five of our other middle order got into double-figures, no-one was able to dominate, and once again we knew we were 50 runs short at our final total of 195-7. Several of our batsmen struggled with the bouncy coconut matting - unable to keep the ball down when forcing the spinners into the offside. Again, rather frustrating.
Matale Hindu College came out all-guns blazing, and knocked off their target in just 22.3 overs, as they hammered their way along at 9 runs per over. This was by far our most disappointing bowling performance of the tour, as our bowlers failed to bowl one side of the wicket, bowling too many wides and being guilty of 2-3 ‘boundary balls’ per over. Tim bowled well at times and produced a lovely yorker to dispense of one of the openers, but this didn’t dampen their extremely aggressive response. Several of their batsmen were swinging themselves off their feet in an apparent competition to hit the biggest 6. It was easy to understand how this nation produced the revolution in limited overs batting that exploded onto the 1996 Word Cup. Kishan (64) was particularly brutal, but also the classiest of the oppo’s batsmen, and he helped himself to a succession of huge, clinical 6s. Even Joe struggled here - unable to contain or take wickets. Ian Hutchcroft (2-13) was brought on in the latter stages, and again showed the benefits of accurate, flighted fare, and was aided by Dave G pocketing two great catches in the deep. These two wickets in an over gave us a brief sniff of hope that Matale would collapse spectacularly, but instead they only paused before once again biffing their way to a substantial victory.
Overall, our batting was more enterprising, but our bowling was woeful. Again we also dropped catches. We looked something of a tired outfit.
Written By: The Brothers Gower
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