Good work by the Chesham Bois gang to get this fixture played. Soho were down to 5 players due to holidays and injury, but great recruitment work by Jitender, Hari and Woody got us up to a 9 v 10 match. Jitender, Samar, Woody and Imran joined Soho’s ranks and we lent each other players so we each had 11 fielders to plug the gaps.

Chesham Bois batted first with Gaurav and Luke spearheading a handy looking top order. Luke (4) departed to the first of Woody’s 3 catches and was quickly followed by Uma (9), which dented our scoring ambitions. Alex (12) wasn’t hanging around and cracked 3 boundaries before being stumped chasing another. Gauransh made a classy 30 as he and Gaurav(57) began the rebuilding job. Hrian (7), Hrishi (5) and Dhimaj (8) added useful runs before the last pair of Abrar and the skipper were left to bat out the final few overs. Batting all our 30 overs and getting past 200 seemed a reasonable target at this point, but I hadn’t counted on the very unreasonable batting of Abrar, who finished with the top score of 58 not out off the last 4 overs or so. 240 off 30 overs was a good score.

In reply, Jitender (46) anchored their early innings as Hrishi (6-0-25-1) and Abrar (6-2-17-1) made scoring difficult. Gauransh (3-0-32-0) got a few overs under his belt as along with Dhimaj (5-0-47-2) now faced Soho batting that needed to up the rate. Luke (4-0-40-2) chipped away at the wickets column as Uma (4-0-28-0) protected the short leg side boundary. Hrian (2-0-16-1) picked up a wicket in his brief spell as Soho closed on just past the 200 mark. Another great enjoyable game against the guys from Soho on a day, as they say, when the real winner was cricket.