On a sunny yet breezy and crisp Saturday afternoon MCC took on Uvic in their second fixture of the shortened summer schedule. It was a day for debuts as Arnav and Nick earned their first MCC caps and Bootstrap captained the team for the first time. Will quickly rocketed to the top of the toss percentage charts with a win and elected to bat, sending Ross and Nick to the crease, with instructions from his pre match speech still ringing in their ears: “we just need to bat the 45”. Ross and Nick set about the task methodically and soon had seen off the first 15 overs. Despite a corpse-like run rate of around 2 an over, spirits were high as the 20th over came and went without loss. Unfortunately the snipers struck in the 22nd as Nick pulled a hamstring setting off for a quick single and was forced to retire hurt. This brought Chewy to the crease licking his lips at the prospect of getting amongst the runs against a largely mediocre bowling attack. His innings was short-lived unfortunately as Anop, when faced with the prospect of someone else surpassing him at the top of the aggregate runs list, triggered poor Chewy on a close-but-obviously-not-out runout chance. Ross followed shortly, bowled trying to bump the run rate. Mr Cricket and Cocks looked to be steadying things before Rob pushed a leading edge to cover, bringing T to the crease. Cocks and T wowed the crowd and gave heart palpitations to the bottom order as they attempted to juice the run rate while giving up 6 chances between them. Eventually the catches started to stick leaving Arnav to put on a much-needed run a ball innings including some cleanly-hit boundaries. Ultimately Cole and a hobbling Nick were able to steer the team to the 45 over mark with a borderline competitive target of 151.
After the traditional vegan Subway platter for tea, the Cougars took the field confident that their bowling and fielding efforts would see them home on a very slow Windsor park field. Tanzil and Rob White bowled nagging, borderline unplayable opening spells going largely unrewarded for their efforts. Run rate pressure forced some suicidal singles with some sharp fielding from Cocks and Mike Smith leading to a couple of runouts. The afternoon wore on and many chances frustratingly did not go to hand. With some classy and intelligent batting from the UVic middle order led largely by Sandeep, by the 32nd over the game had tilted firmly in their favour. Uvic won by 6 wickets in the 37th over, finished appropriately with Cole steaming in off the long run and bowling a wide. Cougars are now 0-2 and look to bounce back against Albion next weekend.
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