16th October 2006 Vs Master of Puppets again

We played this team just two weeks ago which means that both sides pretty much know each others strengths and weaknesses. The Major decided to do a restructure of the grades and this has resulted in our grade now being 5 teams instead of six, with MP Extremes being dropped. Here was the ladder before this game:

Team	W	L	D	For	Agst	%	BP	TP
Towners	9	1	1	1014	772	131.35	49	100
Master of Puppets	7	4	0	1056	927	113.92	52	96
Yorkies	8	3	0	818	767	106.68	42	90
Black Hill Steves	3	4	0	819	1088	75.28	45	87
Bulls	4	7	0	958	1132	87.01	48	72

Based on this we are almost guaranteed a finals spot, and it would be better to finish third rather than second. That way we wouldn’t face the Towners until a potential Grand Final. The way it will probably end up happening is Towners will beat Master of Puppets in the Semi final and hopefully we will beat Black Hill Steves and then face the Puppets in the Pre-Liminary final. There are two more rounds to go before the Finals and we have the Bye in the last round.

While we were playing the Bulls faced the Towners on the other court and made 48 runs. The Towners at one point had 180 runs, so it was a massive win and makes it almost impossible for the Bulls to move up in the last two rounds. Black Hill Steves had the bye.

Now to the match itself, The Puppets only had six players for this game and elected to field first which meant that Cap’n Bob and myself opened as usual. We started off pretty well with 9 from the first over and six off the second, the third over Bob got caught once and I got runout. We scored another 6 in the last over with a single from the last ball, that I and some of our team thought I should have been given out. We finished with 14 on the board. Bob’s net runs was 10 from 13 balls after losing a wicket, while I got zero after the runout. I think I only hit the ball once. One of the runs was a stolen single. This is also the first time in awhile that Bob faced more than 12 balls.

Philbert and Bruce batted second pair and started well with a couple of sidenet shots and they played a few nice shots for 3s and 4s in between the wides. They lost three wickets with a runout and two catches. Their partnership was 23 with Bruce making 16 from 16 balls, while Philbert netted -5 from 8 balls after losing 3 wickets. In the 8 balls faced Philbert actually only hit one that went for 5 runs, the jackpot ball came from his leg as did a single in the second over.

Bendy and Thorpe took up the challenge of third pair and started with a dot ball. They had five runs from the first over before Thorpe was caught, but the next over made up for it with 13 runs which included a 4, two 2s a 3 and a wide, the third over scored 9 runs with three 2s and three singles. The finished off with -2 after a Runout that was on the third ball rule but the ball was wide, so they really didn’t have to run. Their partnership was 20 with Bendy making 17 from 15 balls, and Thorpe netting 1 from 9 balls after the two wickets.

Don King batted last and lost just two wickets through runouts on their way to 25 runs. Both runouts came in the last over of the match in an over that had 8 balls. They got to choose the four bowlers that they would face due to the puppets only having six players. They didn’t played any really big shots with nothing more than a 2, and with the Jackpot ball being doubled to 4 runs. They made 11 from their first over, then 8 and 7 in the next two. The two runouts in the last over netted -1 runs in the over. The Don netted 11 from 14 balls after a runout while the King made 6 from 12 balls after a runout.

Our final score was 82 runs which really wasn’t enough on this particular night. On other night it could well have been enough to beat the puppets but our fielders really struggled to hit the stumps for the runouts. Their first pair made 39 runs with the overs bowled by King, Philbert, Mahstar andBob. Their second pair took the score to 82 with the bowlers being Bruce, Mahstar, Bendy and Thorpe. By that point we really couldn’t win the match, but their third pair made just 18 runs with overs bowled by The Don, King, Bendy, and Bruce. The final pair we had to choose and so we chose the batsmen that we figured had the best chance of getting out, and this happened to a certain extent with the partnership being 2 runs with Thorpe, Philbert, Cap’n and Don taking the ball. The final over of the match we had a chance at wickets on almost every ball. Their final score was 102, which means that we might drop to fourth on the ladder.

Some notable moments from my view was that I got one ball to spin away from the right hander by a fair bit, it might have been the best spin ball I’ve bowled in indoor cricket. They scored an eight off my bowling because they stole an extra from the 7. We missed more than 10 runout chances during the night.