BOTWCC 2nd XI v Sapcote

Saturday 1st July 2006 - Towles Fields

Boy, it was a hot one. The sun shone up above, not even a gnat's fart for a breeze and we were in the field right through the entire lot.

To be honest, this will probably be a short match report as there's very little to put in after a performance like this one. Here goes anyway...

Having won the toss and elected to field on this hard, fast batting track Burton opened with Penton and Morley who started steadily and gave little away as usual. Penton was having no luck at all and Morley similar. The usual suspect John Shipman came on in the 13th over and was soon taking wickets, taking his wicket for the day in his first spell of 5 overs.

Jack Child, whose Daddy was quite impressive with a score book and a pencil case by the way - god bless him, had another good day taking the Sapcote skipper for a duck and the main run-scoring protagonist (K Freeman) after his impressive innings of 59. Rob Morley seemed to take the brunt of that attack and was having a bad day generally, after having first been accused of following through onto the pitch and then some argie-bargie with the visiting team on the boundary and eventually his wife had a pop too. Happy days.

To be honest, I'm struggling here... Lets look at the match in a different way.

- Fielded first

- Fielded badly, runs were leaked everywhere

- Not sure how many catches went down. Too many as always.

- Bowled well to keep the score down to 163

- Pauline took 2 catches and only dropped one

- All bowlers got wickets

- Sam Shipman got more wickets than his dad and stays well above him in the averages

- Burton got the maximum bowling points for the 10 wickets

Sounds good so far doesn't it? Lets not get too excited.

Having lost 5 or 6 players to the first team this week, bowling was all Burton were EVER going to do. And when it came to batting, Burton missed the boat by quite some margin.

We could make excuses here about Sapcote's first teamers helping out on this day, but why should we? We have to meet people who can bowl at some time and when we do, we have to not buckle. But we did. And we buckled in style.

Bearing in mind that only 3 players got more than 5 runs and one of them was a 12 year old on debut, you can guess how badly it went.

Can't you? No? Well, it was bad.

Openers Neal and John Shipman (yes, Shippo opened) went cheaply for 9 and 12 respectively and the next 7 wickets fell for a pitiful 16 runs. Collectively, not each.

The innings only shining lights were Sam Shipman who ended on 10 not out and you Dean Neal who had his first ever bat and scored 7 runs including a corking boundary. Well done that lad, it's about time there was a cricketer in the Neal Family.

We should be fair here and mention the Sapcote bowlers as they only needed two of them to finish the game. K Freeman was the star of the show who after his 59 with the bat bowled quickly and accurately and ended with superb figures of 8.2 overs, 7wickets for 28 runs. The other opener, the Sapcote skipper (L Bartlett) polished off the other end taking 3 for 31.

That's about it really. Burton were all out for 64 and lost by 99 runs. What a corker.

Better luck next week then. At home to Braunstone in the first match in the 2nd half of the season.

Grant Penton 02-07-06

FULL MATCH SCORECARD AVAILABLE HERE

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