The Mogs fielded first against a Teddington side missing their stars due to a neighbouring national cup match against Brondesbury. However a pioneering fixture against one of the pre-eminent clubs in the country (recent winners of the National club and Evening Standard cups) bodes well for future years, and there are certainly worse places to spend a Summer Sunday than deer strewn Bushey Park.
What ensued was a tidy bowling performance punctuated by occasional dropped catches. The pacey quartet of toy-chuckers (Freeland, J Lewis, Abbott, Honeyfield) bowled well but without much luck. Freeland generated genuine pace and bounce in a brief but lively spell and succeeded in making an early break-through, with figures 1-15 before once again being removed for a breach of UN directive 2(b). Honeyfield showed admirable seam(en) control, bounce and direction for his 2-25 and with a lightly used J Lewis 0-16 battled against a Force 9 head-wind to get to the crease.
Inevitably however the afternoon's bowling stars were the indomitable spin twins M Lewis 4-45 and Hewitt 3-43 who formed an effective partnership to winkle out a rather patchy Teddington batting order for a final score of 170. Once again the Mogs rain charm was in full working order and the one black cloud in Southern England managed once again to sprinkle rain into the biting wind, making Hewitt's caught and bowled from burly Harlequins flanker 'Rozzer' Jenkins all the more remarkable - and painful!
Without further delay the Mogs knocked off the runs, stabilised as ever by the reliable Furner who accumulated 63* not out to anchor the innings. Skipper Hewitt came in after a careless middle order wobble and embarked on some lusty hitting in pursuit of cricket's holy grail (The Stella Challenge). However his scattergun tactics (peppering as many targets as possible) failed to work as due to a rare oversight, the sacred target had not been set by the assembled Mogs. Still, as a side effect the game was smoothly won with 4 overs to spare with Hewitt capitalising on some 'captiulation' bowling at the end for an entertaining 55*.
All in all it was a very successful day out as the Mogs managed to defeat Teddington but do it in such a cunningly low key manner that they will not come armed with an outfit of professionals intent on revenge next year. A season's high crowd of 11 familiar faces witnessed the workmanlike performance and many thanks should also go to the holy trinity of Humph, Frank "Not Out" Jackson and Hank Martin who performed the duties of scorer, umpire and twelfth man admirably. In fact the only real negative from the day was the tea which consisted of a half a round of sandwiches that had already been played with
by a classful of children. Next year bring your own grub...
By 'Action' Jackson
MWCC Stats