Game two of the league season for the girls and we were headed off to Hursley park. Starting off the day strong, Lottie realised she had left her blue trousers at home on the couch. With only shorts with her, we called Becky who thankfully had a spare pair and even with long socks, the trousers fitted but looked about three quarter length. Becky went out to toss after a strong start (already winning more toss than last year with a grand total of one) and walked back to us thinking that she won. Turns out she only won the moral victory, loosing the toss but we wanted to bowl anyway (so the outcome was what we wanted but not execution).

Hoping that Hursley didn’t know some secret that we were clueless about, we went out into the field to bowl, with Lottie and Billie opening the bowling. Both girls bowled a very tight line and length and bowled some absolute seeds, quite unlucky not to get a wicket from each end. Becky and willow came on second change, with Becky getting the first breakthrough we needed getting one to stay low on off stump and get through the Hursley Park openers defence. It seemed like the day for the skippers, with AJ claiming the second wicket of the day with another bowled wicket. Becky took the next wicket with a plum LBW. The pitch was slow, but AJ used that to her full advantage and bowling the perfect line and length picking up two more wickets in her spell, one being bowled the other being caught by Maisie at point after her closely watching it spin through the air. From there the wickets fell quite steadily, with Kk, Billie and Becky joining AJ in the wicket taking fun. We fielded the full 40 overs and Hursley Park ended up 9/129 with skippers Becky and AJ both taking 3 wickets each.

Hursley Park didn’t have teas, but Claire SJ had brought Tupperware containers of snacks for the hungry crickets like the legend that she is. Bread knife in hand, she had brought scones (along with jam and cream with jam definetly going at the bottom), vegetarian and meat sausage rolls and chocolate flapjack which was hungrily devoured by all the girls with no crumbs left.

Hope and myself opened up the batting. We knew it would be tough going, seeing how the pitch and the outfield played during our bowling innings. We started off well. Runs felt few and far between but with a required run rate of just over 3, we were still well above that. Hursley Park kept on saying let’s go HP, with Hope saying she kept thinking they were talking about sauce. Turns out that was very fitting, with a miscommunication resulting in a BBQed run out. Tbh either of us would’ve been well out of our crease but the ball was unfortunately thrown to hopes end, departing with the score at 1/24. Annabelle Bailey came in but got bowled an absolute seed early on, bringing skipper Becky to the crease with the score at 2/25. The thought at this point was it’s trickey batting let’s just get it done. Full focus was needed and with runs hard to come by, some smart cricket was needed. I’m going to apologise to everyone watching, it was boring cricket. We were getting it done but it was slow and would’ve been painful. Across both teams, no one had a strike rate above 70 and it felt that way out there. After I nearly ran Becky out the week before by hitting one straight to point and running, she evened out the score to 1-1 nearly doing the exact same thing. We eventually got it done and we’re 2/131 in 33 overs, winning by 8 wickets.

Good win in the end making it 2/2 for the girls! Thanks to Doz for umpiring, Sharpie for coaching, David for scoring and Claire for making us snacks in the middle. Onto next week when we are back home against New Forest.