Match: St Andrews University Staff CC
Venue: St Andrews
Date: 20 May 2008
Format: Friendly – 20 overs per side
Toss: DUSCC who chose to bat
Result: St Andrews University Staff CC won by 5 wickets

DUSCC innings

Bowling: M Clarke 4-1-25-1; A Stewart 4-1-31-0; D Miller 4-1-8-2; S Frankland 4-0-23-0; J Bagnall 3-0-30-0; G Hall 1-0-2-0

FoW: 1-23; 2-65; 3-127

SAUSCC innings

Bowling: D Petrie 4-0-19-0; A MacDonald 4-0-26-2; D Heather 4-0-23-0; S Dayal 4-0-34-1; R Miller 2.3-0-22-1

FoW: 1-4; 2-26; 3-85; 4-117; 5-117

Report

DUSCC lost its unbeaten record for 2008 (consisting of, um, 2 games) in a well-fought match against our St Andrews University counterparts. On a very pleasant evening, and one day ahead of schedule to allow viewing of the Champions League final on the Wednesday, DUSCC won the toss and batted first on what was a hard, true surface which batsmen would love to roll up and take with them. After a relatively slow opening, steady top order contributions were headed by Steve Boarder who scored his second half-century in consecutive games before retiring. The final total of 129 may have been 4 runs higher had Varun Gopalakrishnan, standing at the non-striker’s end, been able to evade a fiercely hit straight drive from Dennis Petrie (21 not out) towards the end of the innings. He wasn’t, and was forced to retire hurt with a painful-looking blow to the arm.

On such a good wicket, and with something of a makeshift bowling attack, 129 looked a few runs short. Alan MacDonald, having been discovered with unknown bowling ability at Doocot Park, bowled well and took two early wickets, but SAUSCC were scoring at a consistently high rate through their chase. Their no.4 batsman scored his own 50 and guided them home with 9 balls to spare. DUSCC players will suspect that he was out stumped early in his knock but given not out, but we had plenty of other opportunities to take his and further wickets and pretty much shelled them all – we ran the whole gamut from dropped catches to missed stumpings and run-outs. Duncan Heather, the unlucky bowler on the receiving end of a few of these errors, was accurately told at one point “you’ll just have to hit the stumps”. A highlight of the innings was Richard Miller’s wicket, where he did manage to hit the stumps and broke one of the bails in the process. For those who were not there or aware of Richard’s bowling – this could only have been due to the extreme pace. Yes indeed.

This was a very enjoyable game, and we will meet SUASCC again in June in attempting to win back the Ferrier Cup. This is due to be at Riverside, so a batting paradise akin to this one is not anticipated…