Accrington Cricket Club

Zed's Diary
Follow our 3rd Team skipper on his journey onwards and upwards. From humble beginnings with the A Team, Zed has now assumed charge of the 3rds. With the 2nd team captaincy next in his sights Zed continues his journey to the top.

Being so unaccustomed to winning the toss, I found myself winning my second toss in a row and without hesitation deciding to bat on a dry but solid pitch. I was hoping for a target of around 180 plus. Despite losing the wicket of Rick Williams early (1), Ormy and Si Hanson managed to put on 130 runs for second wicket partnership.

It was like the little and large show with Ormy (64) using his excess weight to great advantage biffing the bad balls away to the boundary. Having got to his first fifty no doubt many more will follow, for this young lad is slowly beginning to get runs with the bat and not just his mouth (the opposition widely acknowledge the great resourcefulness of this multi skilled sledger). The one and only major area of concern for Ormy is his running between the wickets. I think he has been taking too much advice off Immy Hussain in the dressing room about the nature of turning easy 3's into hard run 2's and the 'fact' that there is no such thing as a quick run single!

Our end of innings score was 209-4 and although the tone was set by Ormy it was Si Hanson who carried the attack to the opposition. He used his low centre of gravity with great skill, cajoling, cutting and driving the ball all over the park. He scored a magnificent 90 and in the last 8 overs with myself (18*) at the crease we managed to score over 60 runs.

Our batting was brilliant, our bowling was decent and our fielding and especially catching was so atrocious that spectators thought they were watching the 'blind' 11. We managed to lose the match by 2 wickets off the third to last ball of Tod's innings. For me as captain it was my worst experience to date as I watched 8 simple catches go down, numerous run out chances go amiss and overthrows galore.

Lucky capital punishment doesn't exist, if it did the first person I would shoot is Immy. He missed a run out chance....he was a foot away from the stumps whilst the batter was half way down the wicket and he still missed the stumps. At that stage Tod needed 12 off 11 balls and were 8 down.

People often ask me why I belittle or pick on Immy in my postings on the website, it's not because I am harsh on the guy or that he is an easy victim, the real reason is because he was born with two left feet, two right hands one eye and the intellect of a smelly sock and this reflects in his ability and cricketing thought on the field.