The Badgers began their 2015 T20 campaign with a “played 27, lost 17” record in this format. Can‘t really figure out why, but we often balls it up. Not today though. The toss was won and the Badgers went eagerly out to bat on sunny evening at Wandsworth Common.
We always retire at 30 in this game, and Cornish was looking for a 6 ball innings and then a beer. But the ever tricky Wandsworth pitch made life difficult, pea rolling him out. However, others fared better, with a fine and rapid 30* from Jinksy bought up in style with a lofted straight drive. JD and Thorpey looked magnificent as ever, hitting some lovely boundaries before falling. Shoney knows that T20 is his traditional time to shine and unleashed his usual array of shots in a vital 30*, causing one of the fielding side to comment to the umpire that he thought the leg side was being favoured somewhat. Coming soon, Badger opposition notice that Stew McKluskey has quite a loud voice and that Allyn doesn‘t like wearing t-shirts. Cadey topped the strike rate stakes with 2 (runout) from 1 ball.
The opposition had declined the use of a bright pink ball, but for now the light conditions remained reasonably good. Paul “Pegasus” Cole and Henry Lewis opened the bowling with aplomb, getting fantastic movement and keeping the runs down by beating the bat. The LJ‘s were not giving up by any means, however, and threw the bat to good effect, despite the regular fall of wickets. Hamblin bowled an excellent spell and took 2 important wickets. The light started to deteriorate. Slow bowlers were called for and the left arm spin twins were deployed. More shots were played, the aggressive LJ‘s Cammy retired for a fast 30 and things began to get close. Rory and Cadey bowled well, taking 5 wickets between them but ran out of overs.
We needed 2 more overs of canny slow bowling with our front line spinners used up. Up stepped Cornish, bravely trying out some off spin and unsurprisingly turning out to be good at it. It came down to the last - 15 runs required. T20 star Shone showed that he has the cojones of a true honey badger and offered to bowl the last over. Bravely mixing it up, he bamboozled the LJ‘s and restricted them to just 11 runs off the first 5 balls. It was 4 to win. Shoney floats up the “wide yorker” and the batsmen could only manage a single.
It was an incredibly tense finish and the Badgers wisely retired to the pub with the oppo where Paul Cole downed a sausage roll, Cadey down a pint thrice (on a school night) and Paul Cole took the lead in the Badger pentathlon beer leg.