First home fixture

Game was played with the now so familiar rules:

20 over game
10 players a side
Each team starts on 200
Lose 4 runs for each wicket
'No-balls' and 'Wides' give away 2 runs and are not re-bowled

The boys played an extremely competitive fixture which included a 10 year old playing for Hampstead. They never told me they would do this, and he seemed to be an influential player for the visitors. Hampstead posted 273 from their 20 overs, for the loss of 5 wickets. Three wickets were shared between Alex, Lucas SA, and Silas. The other two wickets were courtesy of neat run outs. Fielding was generally good in this game and the players are learning the importance of backing up the bowler. However in the field, we bowled 23 wides and a no ball, which accumulated to 48 runs being given away. So definitely still an area we need to improve on.

At the half way mark, I was quietly confident that we had the talent to knock these runs off. Alex and Ryan G opened the innings and the running between the wickets was good as they took quite a few quick singles. Tom M then came into bat alongside Charlie and scored freely with some sweetly struck boundaries. When the last pair went into bat we were 6 runs behind the required total, but Zuhayr managed to capitalise on some wayward bowling and ended up top scoring with 14 runs. We finished the game off with 292, which was 19 runs ahead of the winning target

Another concern is that we lost 10 wickets in total, although admittedly one of them was a very dubious stumping against Paul. But never the less this did mean it decreased our total by 40 runs