For the second time this season, everyone turned up at Teddington, enthusiastic and ready for a tough days cricket in the boiling heat. After a gentle warm up, Jaya, the captain, went to do the toss. Berkshire won and chose to field first.

Jaya and Emily opened the batting against the experienced Berkshire bowling attack, Jaya loosing her wicket early. Next up was Helena who soon got an lbw decision against her. Things didn’t get a lot better when we rapidly lost the wickets of Emily and Victoria. What we needed was a strong partnership to pull us through the desperate situation we had found ourselves in. Hannah Stobbs and Sara Begg stepped up and batted through some of the overs, scoring runs along the way, Sara getting the high score of 13. Soon, however, they were sent on their way. Melissa and Sibohan followed, Melissa with another lbw decision and Sibohan being caught off H Murphey’s bowling. Again, our tail end really showed us how it was done, Mala, Hannah Rea and our new recruit, Claire, adding 21 runs to the score. Claire hit two spectacular fours before being bowled to finish our innings.

Unfortunately we only managed to use up 20.3 of our 35 overs, and managed to put a score of 89 on the board, which was a lot lower than we would have liked. At the break, everyone was a little disheartened, but encouragement from our coach, Ranjit, made us go out to bowl with a positive mindset, we had defended lower scores than this and knew we had a team that could do it again.

The pitch gave the opening bowlers a helping hand, and Sara took the first wicket after a good spell of bowling. The heat meant that our openers only bowled three overs each, and on came Melissa and Emily. Melissa bowled two very consistent overs, keeping the runs down, while at the other end, Emily took another wicket, after a great appeal from Helena Stolle. Replacing Melissa at the far end was Mala. In her first over, she took two wickets and continued to bowl a fantastic line and taking more wickets. This great display of bowling resulted in us going off at the tea break having restricted Berkshire to 61-7. Mala really excelled herself, taking final figures of 5 overs, 3 maidens, 11 runs and 6 wickets.

After the tea break, the other new face in our side, Aisha, came on to give Claire a well-earned break, and fielded magnificently. Sara, Victoria, Sibohan and Mala bowled economic overs after the break with Emily Jones taking the final wicket, the batter being stumped after quick work by Helena behind the wicket.

The whole team would like to thank all the parents involved in managing, scoring, preparing teas and drinks and, of course, cheering the team on. Special thanks to Ranjit for coming along to coach, help and support us.