Good morning world!
It's been long over a year since I last updated this blog (I'm blaming the rather ambitious scale of the match reports that I set myself), and seeing as how we've just cycled back round the fixture list to play the See You Next Tuesday's again, I thought I'd give this a go.
A lot has changed in the last year, we've had a fairly incredible turnover of personnel. Henry, our frightfully nice all-rounder has moved to India, and was last seen pummeling an eleven year old legspinner over deep midwicket on the outskirts of Mumbai. Well how will they learn to pitch it up otherwise?
Golden arm Paul Arthur has taken his double bouncing yorker and scarpered, ditching 8 a side cricket for 5 a side football on Tuesday evenings. Mick Mistry was never seen again after his record of two games, two injuries. We can only pray for his ongoing safety. Andy Biggadike has retired from all forms of cricket to spend more time with his desk, which is an immense loss to yorker length fizzbombs, but a great gain for the fraud protection office of Barclays. If you're thinking about it, don't: he's lethal. Big hitting Welshman Steve Evans has also been consumed by work - albeit of a more artisan nature. He spends his Tuesday evenings less than a mile from us in the Regents Park Open Air Theatre, making sure their lighting rigs work. Sometimes I appeal extra loudly so he knows we're playing.
In their place though, the 2012 vintage of the Old Estonians have made some proper tidy acquisitions. Alexis joined us at the start of the season and has already recorded three 50s in four games, which definitely takes the pressure off the rest of the batting. Our pair of Toms, Godsmark and Martin, have returned like different players, the former now a trusted and economical wicket taker with great composure, control and consistency, and the latter a rejuvenated stroke-maker, batting with the technical flair and grit of his ginger heroes, messrs Collingwood and Morgan. Our bowling department has been supplemented by our sub-continental seam attack of Sid and Biranchi, who always offer something different with the ball and have a knack of picking up wickets at key times, and the twin Eds, Greig and Wright, have joined the ranks, always ready to provide classy English strokemaking to the top order, should one of the regulars not be around.
Adding these guys to last season's core of myself, Jim, Canadian Superstar Nick Ashwood and the best opening bowlers in the league, Dom and Clem, means we've really become a team to reckon with this season.
I'm going to try and do something technical now. Bear with me. Here's (I hope) a storified version of our match yesterday.
In my nose-bashed state yesterday night, I'm not sure I really gave enough credit to Tom Martin for his superb bowling (1/24 off 4, our best economy rate of the night) or Nick Ashwood for some criminally big hitting in the closing overs. His 35* off 14 balls rivals Scott Styris' knock last night for heavy hit after heavy hit.
You'll all be glad to hear that via a complicated process of prodding, poking, x-raying and more prodding, the nice people at Accident and Emergency have declared my nose and cheekbone to be fully intact, if a little bruised.
I asked them if I'd be able to hit sixes after this accident. They said they were sure I would. Which is great because I wasn't able to do that before. BOOM BOOM.
The scorecard from yesterday can be found at the following link: Old Estonians vs. See You Next Tuesdays.
