The 29^th of May saw the inaugural matchup between the world’s greatest cricket team, The Mighty Greys, and Buxted Park.  The day started well enough, the weather was warm and sunny, and on arrival, Buxted Park proved to be a lovely setting.  However on reflection a clue as to how the game was going to go was evident in the fact that the opposition were young and athletic looking, and even more concerning they were actually practicing in the nests before the game started.  Despite this the Greys were in confident mood after the previous week’s victory but the first victory of the day went to the Buxted park skipper who won the toss and elected to bat first.

The greys got off to a fairly inauspicious start in the field when leading wicket taker Robby Hoare pulled up injured in his second over, a result of doing tricep dips in the park in an attempt to impress girls.  E.O replaced the crocked soon to be opening batsman (more on that later) and kept things fairly tight, but Buxted park went along easily enough until Gallagher managed to persuade one of the openers to sky a drive.  The ball went high and probably swirled viciously but underneath it Terry was the definition of composure, snaffling the ball to get TMG under way.  The next breakthrough came soon afterwards when the Buxted Park No.3 had his off stump removed by Gallagher in fairly spectacular fashion.  The most remarkable thing was that as the stump went cartwheeling off into the distance (the stump definitely performed at least 4 full rotations despite what anyone else says) the bail fell directly into the hole so recently vacated by said off stump.  You know that trick where a tablecloth is removed without disturbing all the cutlery and whatnot, it was like that.  As far as anyone can tell this was a world first and so won PSM for the day.

Unfortunately for The Greys this dismissal brought Buxted Park’s overseas pro to the middle and to cut a long story short he smashed us all over the place.  He damaged all the bowlers figures on his way to a hundred, but thankfully once he’d reached three figures he retired.  When not bowling at someone who actually gets paid to play cricket The Greys bowlers did quite well.  As already mentioned E.O kept things pretty tight, QB (2 for 56) produced a couple of classic QB in swingers to dismiss the No. 5 & 6, and Biff snuck in at the end to take 2 for 6.  Ibu and Richy also bowled well, keeping the scoring rate reasonable at the end with batsmen looking to score on what was a good batting surface.  In the end Buxted Park scored 205 for 6, an imposing total even in good batting conditions.

It was less than ideal circumstances for TMG to be chasing such a big score, being a bit light on batting.  Jerry was absent and so Robby was moved up to open with Biff and looked solid until he played across a straight on to be bowled for 2.  At the other end Biff was going along steadily, the ball coming onto the bat better than the previous couple of weeks, which suited the skipper.  Terry showed everyone the correct way to edge the ball for 4, repeating the trick a couple of times to show it wasn’t just luck.  Unfortunately for The Greys, a change in bowling lead to the dismissal of the Skip for 19 and Terry for 12, both falling to the legspin of Peter.  Dom was in at 4 and continued his form from the previous weeks leaping on anything short and pummelling it to the boundary.  The rest of the middle order couldn’t stick with him though as Fenton, Hadrill and Newland all came and went in fairly quick succession.  Dom was then lent some support by Richy P, before tragedy stuck The Greys.  Richy smashed the ball straight to the man at mid-off who picked up the ball and threw down the stumps at the non-strikers end catching Dom (34) out of his ground.  The moral of the story kids; never back up.  The writing was, at this this point, well and truly on the wall for The Greys and the rest of the batting decided it was obviously time to finish the game and have a beer.  Richy was left stranded on 9 as The Greys were bowled out for 95 to lose by a shit load.

Despite a pretty heavy loss for The Greys it had been a good day.  The sun had been out and we had found a new fixture in a fantastic setting.