Well, were we given the “mother of all hidings”? A rather rusty and injured effected Willows team came up against a fit and enthusiastic CBHS 1st XI. The school team had just returned from ashort tour of Australia. It had been particularly successful and it wasn’t difficult to see why.

I won the toss and against the strong advice of Andrew Nuttall inserted the opposition. Hopefully there would have been a bit of life in the pitch on an overcast morning. If there was we couldn’t find it. In addition, we were rather too generous with wides and no balls 47 in total or the equivalent of about 8 extra overs! In the end result the school team went through to 257/9 at the end of 50 overs. At one stage we were going for 9 an over so at least we managed to pull back a score which at an early stage looked 300 plus.

School’s batsmen played particularly well. They have a number of players who have real style, sound technique and, more importantly, good temperament and just plain good cricket sense. Their captain B McFarlane went through to a very fine 82 he received good support from S Noster, C Belliss and T Bleyendaal. Our bowlers toiled hard but one or two of them were carrying injuries from the previous day’s club cricket while others were lacking a bit of rhythm at such an early stage of the season.

The less said about our batting the better. We needed a sound and steady start, with a gradual build up in momentum to get us up to the 5 runs an over we needed. We didn’t even come close! We were 16 for 4 after 7 overs with two current Canterbury 1st XI players among the victims. We managed to improve but only slightly and were finally dismissed for 122 in 38.5 overs. If my maths are right, we didn’t even get halfway. Only Sam Davis with 43 not out came through with any credit. The rest of us failed to come up to the mark. All the school bowlers were accurate and persistent.

Quite frankly, we were totally outplayed. The stigma of being dropped from the active players list, as opposed to voluntarily withdrawing, is a real possibility for one or two of us.