Penn Street vs Soho Collective

Penn Street CC 159-3 (D Jones 66, Sam Hennell 42*) beat Soho Collective CC 158 (R Muller 51, D Woodhouse 47; R O’Hagan 6-11) by 7 wickets

It is always a pleasure to welcome the Soho Collective side to Penn Street, especially when, as this year, it has been a while since we have seen them. They are a fine bunch who play cricket in the right spirit and (mostly) with a smile on their faces.

Few things could exemplify that spirit more than one of their openers walking for a caught behind in the second over that the umpire clearly hadn’t seen. There are plenty of other sides with plenty of other players who would’ve just stood their ground at that point.

The wicket was a fine legside take by Dave Jones, playing despite having arrived straight off a night shift, from the bowling of Simon Hennell, who had himself generously agreed to play after a last-minute drop out.

Another who is rarely seen in Penn Street colours is Grant Henry, but he was also soon into the action, pulling off an excellent diving catch at fine leg to dismiss Soho’s number three off the bowling of Chris Lovewell. He followed that with a fine spell of bowling which had the batters looking distinctly uncomfortable.

Despite that discomfort, the batters gamely dug in to try to build a total for the Collective. Luck did not appear to be running Penn Street’s way. Asif just failed to pull off a repeat of last week’s spectacular grab, although he did take a possibly more useful one when one of his contact lenses spontaneously fell out as he was looking for a ball and he reflexively grabbed it as it headed for the ground. Dave Adams saw at least two balls fly off the edge of the bat but just out of the grasp of the slips.

The third wicket pairing of Woodhouse and Muller, despite sounding like a long-gone 1980s furniture store, had put on 84 runs when captain President Matt Reavey had a flash of inspiration and brought Simon Hennell back into the attack. One ball and Woodhouse hacked the ball straight into the presidential palms at mid-off.

Due to the extreme heat (and, in Penn Street’s case, the need to keep their wicketkeeper awake) it had been agreed that drinks would be taken every ten overs. By the time the 30 over break arrived Soho had somewhat crawled to 127-3 and were in danger of not posting a very competitive total. After some intense thinking over the short interval the captain decided to offer them a bit of help and threw the ball to the Club Secretary for the first over back. The second ball was inexplicably pulled straight into the hands of Sam Hennell at midwicket. The new batter for some reason then tamely batted the next four balls back to create a wicket maiden, rather than the 36 run boost to the Soho total that the President had surely intended.

Still, you don’t discard a good plan after one failure, so six balls later the Secretary was back again. First ball, Muller inexplicably walked down the pitch to take the ball on the full and lobbed it into the President’s paws at mid-on. Next ball the new batter somehow managed to send a loopy catch into the hands of Henry at slip. 127-3 had become 128-6 through very little fault on the part of the bowler.

Normal service was then resumed. Soho took their score to 149 without further adventures. A baby started crying in The Squirrel. Sam Saunders commented to the Secretary ‘Mate, your bowling’s so bad it’s even making children cry’. For context, the Secretary was bowling, a baby was crying, and correlation might sometimes imply causation.

We are now at the start of the 37 th over. A conversation then took place between two members of the PSCC Committee:

President: This guy is hitting a lot of stuff on the off side, do you want another fielder over there

Secretary: Nah, I just won’t bowl him anything he can hit over there.

Inevitably, the first ball of the over was delivered exactly in the wrong place, ready to be thumped through the off side. Less inevitably, the batter then decided to hit it straight to Saunders instead, giving our leading Aussie player of the season his first PSCC catch. It was his second notable event of the day, the first being that he finally went a whole game without complaining of being cold.

Strange things kept happening. The Secretary bowled a straight ball. Startled, the batter tried to hit it over the scoreboard, missed and was lbw. Normally a five wicket haul is greeted by cheers and applause. This one, quite rightly, was greeted with stunned silence. And if it is possible for a stunned silence to get louder, then it did two balls later when the new batter skied the ball into the sure grasp of Lovewell at cover. If this was buffet bowling, then the buffet had become lethal in the heat.

There were just enough overs left for Henry to pick up a well-deserved wicket to round off a Soho innings which had gone in a direction that no-one expected.

Set 159 to win, the President opened with himself and Jones. The latter was clearly keen to get on with things whilst he could still stand as he pounded his third ball to the straight boundary and didn’t really look back from there. The two of them put on 34 in short time before the President got a good ball that bowled him.

The next batter was Sam Hennell, himself playing without a full complement of sleep as he had only flown in from Australia the day before. He and Jones took full advantage of bowling which was dogged without being that threatening and took the score to 94 before Jones, having only just brought up his fifty, was caught at midwicket. Rob Sutherland came in and looked his usual untroubled self but was unluckily bowled by a ball which clipped the top of his pad and somehow deflected down onto the stumps.

At this point Soho might have thought that they were back in the game, so Adams came in to disabuse them of that idea by hitting 27 off just nine balls. In all it took just 16.2 overs to pass Soho’s target and we were all in the Squirrel before dinnertime.

For those of you looking for a TL:DR on this, here it is: PSCC won by 7 wickets largely due to two batters who had had about 4 hours’ sleep between them in the previous 36. The Club Secretary somehow ended up with what (if the website is to be believed) are the third best bowling figures for the club since 2008. Sam wasn’t cold.

PSCC: Matt Reavey (c), Dave Jones (wk), Sam Hennell, Rob Sutherland, Dave Adams, Sam Saunders, Asif Teja, Grant Henry, Chris Lovewell, Simon Hennell, Richard O’Hagan (pies)