Saturday 6th June

Match Report - Alliance Division 5 vs Bradenham A (home)

In a bid to bring the club closer together I feel the 2's should get a write up to, and it beats lesson planning this evening!

Bradenham turned up to the home of cricket joint top of the table with an impressive run of 200+ scores. 

Rick won the toss and applied some early psychological pressure by asking them to field on another good looking Brooke deck.

Prentice and Cush Jnr Jnr took to the task with some impressive stroke play matched only by their strike rates, Cush off the mark with a squarish cover drive 6!  Prent un-characteristically drove the attack to the boundary on his way to a quick 20 before Daynsey gave him the kiss of death by predicting a big score! The Cushing partnership didn’t last long before Shearer joined Cush Jnr adding a quickfire 40 runs. 

Cush played well for his 35 before Daynsey took over the show.  He batted beautifully after retiring earlier in the week and with support from mad dog and Shaq took the score past 200.  The only disappointment came when he picked out the only fielder within 50 metres on the boundary for a well made 81 with his ton on the horizon.

The innings fell away a little towards the end and we were probably 20 runs short but 243 was a good effort and backed up Rick’s decision to bat first.

Tea was magnificent, Pete using all of his decades of tea making experience and I felt thoroughly sick going out to field for the 2nd week in a row, well done.

Bradenham started brightly with some cowboy strokeplay and little in it for the seamers.

Shearer came on to bowl in the alliance for the 1st time since 2002 and struck with my 2nd ball removing the dangerous looking opener thanks to a superb diving catch from Paul ‘Leverock’ Daynes.  It wasn’t long before Brooke’s 4 pronged spin attack was brought into action with varying levels of success.  Simon bowled with great variation mixing up the waist high full tosses with double bouncers.  Ken Prentice bowled 8 tidy overs picking up 2 for with a good economy and had the main batsman out stumped when he walked up to join Ken at his end mid delivery only for the visiting umpire to turn the appeal down.

The game started to slip away from Brooke and heads began to drop as the strong top order plundered loose bowling but some great encouragement and tempo from players like mad dog and Ken kept everyone going and the re-introduction of the opening attack brought the breakthrough.  Mike Rohan Douglas bowled tightly and picked up 2 in an over although he couldn’t quite remove the 6 year old.  It didn’t matter though as it was all over shortly afterwards with an amazing hat trick from the skip, clean bowling all of them.  5 wickets for no runs with only 26 runs needs and plenty of overs left, fantastic effort and the Bradenham boys looked gutted as we came off the pitch.

Points to work on:

Dig out maps and start planning for away games as we enter the road trip section of the season

Get all of our golf shots out of the way pre-match next week with the Cromer pitch and putt open this Saturday

More official Brooke C.C after match clothing.  Only a few of us got suited and booted after the game which led to their opening bowler asking me where I’d parked my bus!

Ali (best dressed after match cricketer)