3rds produce best display of the season.

We arrived at a cloudy Raunds still smarting from last week with a strong side looking to bounce back .

For once Kev lost the toss and Raunds put us in.

Vineet Patel and Kiron Das opened up getting us off to a steady start against a useful Raunds bowling attack reaching 42 without loss before Vineet was bowled for 23. Next in was Zahid Mirza who carried on his recent good form with the bat building a good partnership with Kiron and getting the total up to 113 before Zahid was bowled for a fine 53. Ollie Newton batting at 4 continued the support for Kiron putting on another 50 runs together before playing one big shot too many when he was out for 24 with the score on 163-3. Some fine running between the wickets by Kiron and Harry Knibbs took the total up to a respectable 196-4 when Kiron was finally out for an excellent 68. At the end of our 45 overs we had reached a competitive total of 208-5. Easily our best batting performance of the season so far.

Raunds reply was soon faltering when Kev bowled the opening bat for 0 in the first over. It continued with some fine bowling from Finn Herrington who proceeded to take the next 3 wickets in his 6 over spell with the help of some super catches from Harry Knibbs 2 and Ollie Newton. When Finn finished his spell with impressive figures of 6-1-18-3 Raunds were in real trouble at 25-4.
Horton continued to bowl and field well throughout the rest of the innings and if it wasn't for a good knock from Raunds skipper Dan Piggott 63 we would have won even more comfortably than bowling them out for 139.

Our bowling figures were impressive throughout, Kev 1-25 , Paul Wolstenholme 2-35, Ian Street 2-40 and Nik Patel taking the final wicket with his first ball 1-0. The fielding was superb and we took some great catches including 2 from Finn one of which was Piggott when we needed it. Ollie, Harry and Kiron kept the runs down with some excellent work in the deep.

All in all a great win by 69 runs and 29 points meaning we close the gap to Raunds who were just above us in the table.

Next week we will be playing at HOME for only the second time this season against St Crispins , a team we know we can beat.
Let's use this as a springboard for a good second half of the season.

Kev Taylor 3rd team captain