BOTWCC 2nd XI v Braunstone Cricketers

Saturday 23rd may

As history has now repeated itself with a painful degree of accuracy, I'll spare myself and your good selves the pain of too much rhetoric on the subject of yet another Two's defeat.

Truthfully, with a full quota of our best 11 players on the pitch, we might have more chance on a weekly basis, and since the 1st game of the season we've not had that. This week, the club was decimated by the quite ridiculous sport of rugby (lots of fat drunken students chasing an egg around a pitch for 80 minutes) as Tigers lost another cup final to some paddy bog bashing muck savages. Whatever all that means.

Still, back to the cricket.

With less than a full 11 (10) Burton won the toss and elected to bat first and hope the other players who were drafted in to play turned up. They didn't. But thanks to Dean Neal, we made 10 players anyway.

Things went badly from the start as the Braunstone opening bowlers took the scalps of Warner and Lanky in very quick succession. So Steve Neal was once again forced to hold the fort and bat sensibly while the rest of the team fell apart around him. Which he did, until the 37th over where he finally fell on 46 to a shocker of a short ball which he managed to pop it up to a waiting fielder.

Little else happened other than another cameo by the ever lively Jack Child (10) and a fair go by Lanky's mate Will (12) but after 43.2 overs Burton were all out (9 wickets) for 105 runs.

The 2nd innings was an almost exact re-run of last week's shenanigans at Hathern, only Burton bowled relatively well this time.

Penton and Child opened for the first 7 overs apiece but, as usual, with no effect. Few runs were on the board but 10 wickets still remained. And so they did until the end.

Despite the efforts of all possible bowlers on the day including Dean and Colin Watson, Braunstone knocked the final runs off in the 33rd over.

Yep, another 10 wicket defeat under the belt. It might not have been so if we'd managed to post a decent score and put them under pressure to score runs, but small totals are easy to reach if you don't lose your head and the Braunstone bats did the job very well.

Ain' t life great in Division 4.

Hopefully a full team next week at The Walton's place might give us a better chance. Hopefully.

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