Stumped

After a lay-off of a few weeks (unsurprisingly, I wasn't needed for a while after making my debut...), Tuesday evening saw my second foray into the wonderful world of work cricket.

This time was rather different. The weather was beautiful, for a start - a warm, blue-skyed summer's evening. The opposition being Oxford Ladies, captained by one of our own, the competitive edge was rather less sharply pronounced as it had been against our rivals - a fact reflected by the amount of banter and good-natured sledging that was going on, not to mention the cans of Stella and Strongbow that by the end of the game marked out the boundary as clearly as the plastic flags...

Beginning my two over spell, I soon settled into a regular pattern - wide, followed by straight trundler just past the stumps, followed by wide, followed by straight trundler just past the stumps. There were a couple of inadvertent beamers thrown in there for good measure. In all, I think I must have bowled 20 balls. Fortunately, one was actually on target and snuck past the bat to clip leg stump. The feeling of triumph was tempered somewhat by the fact that the girl I'd dismissed was a teenager we'd been asked to go easy on, though - let's just say my celebration redefined sheepishness.

My batting performance, opening our innings, was much the same: not as bad as it could have been, but not far off. I ran a few byes and smacked one loose delivery for two to get off the mark, but swiped at several and was soon out to a delivery that looped high in the air, hit the deck and shot along the ground onto middle stump.

Still, it was all good, clean fun - and the winning was nice...