Redactives 21 - 27 Loan Wolves
"Give him a squad. See what he does with it"
With Alex busy at a tournament overseas this weekend, it fell to me as vice-captain to put the Loan Wolves' PSL team together. This involved a lot of constantly-changing batting line-ups and names on diagrams of diamonds scribbled on the backs of envelopes. By match time, I was as ready as I would ever be. Just to give you an idea of how preoccupied I was with my role, I got to the park before I realised I'd forgotten to buy any wine gums.
tuesday's weather cleared up after all the rain we'd been having, and Primrose Hill was pretty summery when we assembled prior to the game. It was ornithologist Julian's first PSL match, and it was nice that he got to see one of the Primrose Hill kestrels before it started.
We were playing the Redactives, which I happen to think is a pretty good name. They seemed a friendly bunch, and had some competitive players.
After anxiously waiting for the team to assemble, I was glad to see that everyone we had expected was there. Mainly because I didn't have to rewrite the line-up yet again. After the players had a warm-up, I called out the line-up and fielding positions, and we were ready. I optimistically told the team that batting first would give us the psychological edge, as the opposition would be chasing us all the game. And bless them, they seemed to believe it, posting twelve runs in our first inning! Our average fell in later innings, but we kept pressure on the opposition with the bat throughout.
In the field we had Julian's pitching experience and Gareth's sterling performance at Shortstop to build our defence upon. It was a game which gave lots of invaluable in-game experience to our newer players, some learned through successes and some harder earned. DJ had a great game at Third, and was a blisteringly quick runner - except for the time she stood motionless after hitting. Not quite sure what was going on there. The Pitcher-Catcher out at Home between Julian and Holly was lovely to see, and Gary gained some experience at First. Overall, we did let too many runs slip past us due to errors, though. Some of which could have been avoided had we been communicating better in the field. I had put myself in the line-up as a designated hitter - with hindsight there may have beem times I would have been better placed in the field than on the sidelines. Not for my fielding, but becasue I wouldn't have been shouting from so far away.
The Redactives clawed back some of our lead, in part due to our experimenting with changes to our fielding line-up, but they never overtook us, and the fifth innings came and went leaving us ahead by six. We put another five round to give ourselves a pretty good safety margin going into the bottom of the Sixth. The Redactives hit and hustled and made runs, but we steadily took the outs we needed. Light was starting to fade as it was past nine o'clock, so "ballgame" was called.
We did disagree loudly with many of the umpire's decisions, and indeed hurled much abuse at him for calls which went against us and generally gave him grief. We wouldn't normally do such a thing, but the umpire was our own club capain Blasey, who had come along to see newer players in action and offer support and coaching advice, and ended up behind the plate.
A good all-round performance, but one which we can definitely improve on. I'll take that for my first time out as captain.