Game Day #8 - Park Hill: Seven Tosses For Seven Losses

Game Day #8 brought us to Ewell, to the Old Haileyburians Sports Ground to be precise; a place we’ve visited before, but to play the team formerly known as Deando Ruxley and now know as plain old Ewell. We were there to play Park Hill; nobody had ever played against them before, but a measured scan of their season’s results on Play Cricket – the fount of all knowledge for Sunday captains; our Opta index, the kind of thing Sam Allardyce would praise to the heavens if he played our game – promised a team similar to my Boars. Sometimes they’d make less than a hundred, sometimes they’d get to 160/170 and set up a real good game. And so that was what we were all hoping for, after two chastening Sundays had brought the kind of beatings likely to sap at morale and enthusiasm.

I’d already decided to bat first if I won the toss, purely as a result of the forecasted weather: hot, hot, hot. Fielding first is good to get everyone in the game, but if there’s a chance to expose the oppo to the hottest weather of the day, and you think your batting is strong enough, then you take that chance. Selection had been easier this week, with no dropouts once the team had been picked.

But first, there was the small matter of England playing in the World Cup. Their game against Panama kicked off at 1pm, and our game was due to start half an hour later; would we be up for a delayed start, asked their skipper, so we could all watch the first half of the football? Of course we were. And so we all camped down in their wonderfully roomy and well-furnished clubhouse, and spent the next forty-five minutes marvelling at a different kind of England team actually demolish a minnow, rather than our normal constipated 2-0 win. With it being 5-0 at half-time, the oppo skipper and I went out to toss confident that England weren’t going to have lost 6-5 when we came in for tea.

Out we went to toss, and yet again I called correctly – “heads” is my word of 2018. That is now seven triumphant tosses in a row, and I dare any other Merton captain to say they’ve done that. I must’ve set a record. Sadly, none of them are followed by a victory, and so ‘Seven Tosses For Seven Losses’ should be the name of a Broadway musical instead of our season’s record. Ho hum.

The pitch looked flat and mostly grassless, with just some patches on a good length right in front of where all the batters would be standing. And batters was the right word to use, not batsmen – for, in Park Hill’s ranks, was Clare Daniels, the first female player I’ve seen in an opposition (I picked my thirteen year-old daughter to play for us last year, so we’ve selected a mixed team before but never faced one) for a 40-over match. Inevitably, one or two eyebrows were raised her way, especially as she’d been seen bringing in the sandwiches for the tea interval – you know the kind of thing, “Oh, the tea lady’s on the pitch” etc. But for those of us who just like to watch cricket, regardless of the sex of the players, our eyebrows stayed jammed to our foreheads. Ominously for us, she looked fit and raring to go – hardly a makeweight. She would soon show us what she was capable of.

Richard and I opened the batting and faced Lawn, their opening bowler. Dreams of settling in for the first ten overs were rudely shattered on the second ball as Richard played forward, momentarily lost his balance, and was castled by an accurate underarm throw from the wicket-keeper. Maybe watching the football had relaxed us a little too much; suddenly, after two balls of the match, we were 0/1. I stood and stared at the crease that Richard had just departed; had I dreamt it? I couldn’t believe it. Aleem saw off the rest of the over and got a single to face Manson from the other end; his first over was wayward as he struggled to find his bearings, and Aleem took full toll to notch the first two boundaries of the innings. Amidst the wides, Lawn was bowling a nagging middle-stump line and getting balls to lift into the body; after four overs, I still hadn’t scored a run. The pitch was offering late swing and awkward bounce, and when I was straightened up by a good ball from Lawn and outside-edged it into my stumps, the collapse was on. Alex B was bowled by Lawn two overs later, complaining that the wicket-keeper had been talking from the run-up to the delivery, and Dave B perished caught behind to Manson, who had sorted his line and was bowling really well. We were 18-4, and my head was in my hands. Our top five suddenly had more ducks in a row than Hilda Ogden had on her wall in Coronation Street back in the ‘70’s.

Aleem had only been able to score one run in eight overs when Joe got to the crease, who promptly pulled his first ball for four. Enter Daniels to the bowling attack (Lawn had 3-3 after five overs), who was right on the money from her first ball. Her first over was a maiden; the second ball of her second over cleaned up Joe for five. We were 30-5 with almost a third of the innings played, and I well and truly had my Captain Grumpy head on, thumping the table and muttering darkly to myself. If I could’ve smashed a chair in frustration I would, so instead I stomped back to the clubhouse – just in time to see Panama score a goal against England (we’d bagged a sixth by then) to try and clear my head. And then it struck me that my Boars team is just like the Panama’s of this world, and that our day would mirror theirs: smaller gains that we’d have to celebrate passionately, in the face of a likely large beating.

Debutant Abdul joined a clearly frustrated Aleem at the crease, and added some attacking intent to the innings. Daniels had 1-2 after three overs but Abdul hit her for two fours, before perishing to the same bowler one over later. Drinks had just been taken and we were now 49-6; Aleem had scored one run in seventeen overs, and angrily threw his bat away after another back-foot punch went straight to a fielder.

Then came Johnny M, “The Steriliser”, who for the first couple of overs of his innings was also known as Louie, the King of the Swingers from ‘The Jungle Book’. Between them, Aleem and Johnathan finally got the scoreboard ticking over and also managed to find the boundary a few times – Johnathan in particular playing some crunching straight drives. The more he batted the better he got, until their partnership of forty was ended by the returning Manson. It had been his best, most composed innings to date for Merton; crucially, despite the lean overs, Aleem was still out there, holding the innings together. Ian Bawn – now known as Treadstone, according to Richard – went out and accelerated the scoring as he always does, with both Jeavons and the returning Lawn conceding boundaries. We finally reached the team hundred and could dream of a defendable total, but with a couple of overs left, Treadstone gave Jeavons the charge and was stumped. Our last three overs only yielded six runs, but we’d compiled 119-8 and wickets 5-8 had put 89 runs on the board – considering where had our innings had been at drinks, that was a mighty fine achievement. Aleem was still there at the end, having literally chiselled out 34 and not happy with his contribution, but if it hadn’t been for him the match might have already been all over.

We retired to a lovely tea, to find England had beaten Panama 6-1 and had already qualified for the knockout stages, but England’s cricketers were sliding to an improbable defeat against an Aussie team we all wanted to see whitewashed. With the pitch getting slower all the time, I let Joe – the slowest, and canniest, slinger of pies at the club – know that he’d be opening the bowling (last year, an opposition actually put his name down in the book as “Bentos” as they’d heard somebody call him it) with Killer Smither at the other end. I set the field for some big booming drives against Joe’s finest steak and kidney, and wasn’t disappointed; from ball one, Joe had the batters either defending stoutly or trying to whack him over Cow Corner. A succession of play-and-miss efforts had us hoping that early wickets would turn the game our way, but any sliced aerial shots were ominously dropping either side of fielders. At the other end, Killer bowled one loose ball that was pulled for four but then applied the strangler’s tourniquet and was, at times, close to unplayable; Aleem was keeping brilliantly as the bounce became more uneven and the bats resembled windmill blades. Opener Prem looked troubled by the bowling but was still keeping the scoreboard ticking over, until his partner Lush was removed in the tenth over. He tried to hoik Joe’s chicken and mushroom special over mid-off but instead offered an appetising catch to Killer, who made no mistake. Shortly after, it was John’s turn to be rewarded as a wonderful yorker crashed into Blake’s stumps and, whisper it – with the run rate slower than ours – we were back in the game.

Drinks came and went with Park Hill needing more runs per over than they’d needed at the start of the innings, but we still weren’t in the wickets. Having taken over from Joe’s end, Abdul was bowling brilliantly to slow the scoring even further; Sam, at the other end, struggled for line and length but was still producing the kind of deliveries that couldn’t be scored off. Abdul bowled through his seven overs; despite deserving a wicket or two, a globe would be notched in his wickets column. Treadstone came on and struck almost instantly; Goldsborough, who had played well with Prem in keeping the score ticking, was trapped in front and given out lbw. We were running out of time, though, and shortly after Prem notched a gritty, patient 50, the winning runs were scored to secure a seven-wicket win for Park Hill. There were only 25 balls left in the match, prompting another of those “What if?” scenarios: what if we’d scored another twenty or so runs, or taken another couple of wickets? Surely it would’ve been another last-over thriller. Still, it wasn’t to be. Pride can be taken from the fact we’d run them so, so close after posting what had been an ultimately disappointingly low total, and we’d made a real game of it. For the second time this season, Aleem hadn’t conceded a single bye behind the wicket, to cement a growing reputation for being one of the best keepers at the club.

The teams congratulated each other, then discovered that England’s cricketers hadn’t handed Australia a freebie, get-out-of-jail win after all, but had nicked a one-wicket win due to more brilliance from Jos Buttler. Alongside Lewis Hamilton’s win and Harry Kane’s hat-trick, it had been a great day for English sport. The clubhouse Guinness was very cold and went down very well, as those of us who stayed behind reflected on the day we’d had. One of these days, somebody’s going to cop a beating from us; I just hope it’s sooner rather than later. Maybe I need to lose the toss to break the hoodoo.

Our other two Sunday teams, the Wolves and the Rhinos, met with contrasting fortunes; the Wolves went down to a final-over defeat at home to Queensbury, and the Rhinos won a bum-nipper against Southbank by just nine runs.

Time to think of a cricket-based musical, seeing as I already have the title, and give Lord Lloyd-Webber a call. “Seven Tosses For Seven Losses”? It’s a smash!