On a very hot sultry day, skipper Waldock returned to his old ways of losing the toss.  Fortunately AWE Tadley chose to field first, which meant that St. Mary’s batted which would have been the skippers choice.

The innings started off badly with Tim Sanders out caught behind with only 5 on the board.  This brought Mike Stockwell to the crease to join Alan Munday.  Just as Alan was beginning to look more fluent he chose an ill judged shot to a straight ball and was bowled for 14.  This brought in David Bedford, together with Mike they pushed the score on quickly to 88 before David was deceived by the flight of a slow ball and was bowled for an excellent 24.  Stephen Reid then joined Mike who soon after was taken ill and needed to retire.  Ian Bentley replaced Mike and together with Stephen pushed the score on to 121 when Stephen was given out caught.  From this very promising score St. Mary’s then contrived a collapse which saw the remaining wickets fall for just another 26 runs seeing St. Mary’s all out with another 6 overs to go for 147, disappointing when a score more around the 180 mark should have been achieved.

In reply Dan Vickery and Warren Trask fresh from his fiver in the previous match opened the bowling.  The AWE batsmen enjoyed some lose bowling from Warren and despite an unbelievable caught and bowled by Warren they plundered 26 off his first two overs in pushing to 36 for 1 in just 4 overs.  Ian Bentley was introduced to replace Warren with the explicit aim of slowing down the scoring with his accurate bowling, which Ian did conceding just 28 runs in a 10 over spell.  Keith Waldock came on soon after for Dan who whilst being reasonably economical did not look like he would bring a breakthrough.  After slinging 3 balls all over the place in his first over Keith finally managed to work out how to bowl straight and surprised the AWE opener Merricks who was on 20 trapping him LBW.  Keith and Ian then managed to extract very variable bounce from the pitch, with Ian even managing a bouncer over the batsman’s head!  Together Ian and Keith bowled 20 overs only giving away 50 runs but more importantly picked up 6 wickets.  This brought back Warren whose pace was too much for the remaining AWE batsmen with Warren picking up a further two wickets, one from an unbelievable catch by Mike Stockwell who plucked a ball whizzing over his head with a leap which made him look 30 years younger.  The AWE innings came to an soon after at 116 off 30 overs. 

This pushes St. Mary’s up to a heady third in the league!

Champagne moment: Mike’s catch
Wally of the day: Tim Sanders for missing a catch because the sun was in his eyes.
Man of the match: Mike for his 43 not out which was the foundation of the innings and his marvelous catch.