The weather forecast was a rather cold 9 Celsius. The opposition had an average age of 50-plus and included one Mark Stephney, whose claim to fame is being top scorer for Montserrat at the infamous 2006 Stanford 20/20. My memory of that is Allen Stanford bouncing Matt Prior's wife on his lap while watching the game! Mr Prior was definitely keeping an eye on the ball! The sound system that was blaring out reggae and dance hall music the whole day was quite nostalgic for me as they were the tunes of my youth growing up in Hackney! I don’t think I have bogled (1990s dance) so much in 20 years, though I'm not sure it was everyone’s cup of tea.
So we lost the toss and were put into bat. We took two early wickets, with one each for both Kal and Ed. Then entered Mr Stephney. From the outset it was clear we had a classy player in, with so much time for the ball. He and skipper Ray put the Royal Sovereign side back in control – to the joy of the now exuberant Caribbean crowd. My thoughts were how amazing it must have been to watch the West Indies in their pomp. These guys enjoyed cricket in a very different way to the placid English formula. Beer and other things kept the tempo ticking along the whole day!
Enter Rambo and Tim who took two and four wickets respectively, both bowling with excellent control. We ended up restricting them to 187 in their 35 overs, which seemed like a very gettable target.
Toby and JD opened the batting and gave us a solid foundation, putting on 88 for the first wicket, with Toby passing 11,000 career runs for Pacific in the process. Then the Pacific Village side returned. The West Indians gave us a lesson in bowling line and length. Too many batsmen were undone by straight balls and had to hear the death rattle of the stumps being displaced, a sound that hadn’t been heard for six months. We ended up 29 runs short.
Still, it was a nice opening game and it was great to see the Pacific faithful again after an extraordinary winter of lockdown!
MS
TikTok videos of the day's action:
