As he arrived at Ewhurst your correspondent, marvelling at the glorious mid September weather was completely ignorant of the epic deeds that were about to be done. Hewitt lost the toss and a confident Ewhurst, recent winners of the Surrey Downs League, put the Mogs into bat - as unaware as East Coast America of the Hurricane Isobel about to descend upon them.
The Mogs innings started in the usual manner with the Little Master taking a circumspect single an over while Hewitt clubbed at least one boundary from what was an excellent batting track. Mysteriously, rather like a very steep roller coaster the run rate accelerated to impressive speed without anyone really noticing how or when it had happened. Hewitt batted to a clinical 50 off 38 balls, punishing anything short or full - of which there were enough delivered to feed his voracious appetite for runs. When Furner was run out for 19 the skipper was nearing another Mogs century. He was joined by Toby Briggs who was determined to try and match the run rate but he perished trying to power away a straight one scoring 7 off 6 balls. Ben Fairclough was equally committed to maintaining the pace and scored a run a ball though he was unable to get much of the strike as the Captain devoured the bowling.
At 1455 hrs (Bravo) Hewitt reached his ton, the second fifty being off 40 balls. At 1504 hrs. (Bravo) he despatched a full toss on leg stump for an enormous six, right out of the ground and nearly exiting a neighbouring garden. The spectators now realised they were in the midst of something special but they could not realise that the impact of his innings would soon be extended to the wider world.as he launched a blistering sequence of boundaries which resulted in a third fifty off a mere 22 balls. At 1519 hrs. (Bravo) the massively parallel server architecture at Swanwick National Air Traffic Centre instantly scaled up to its full processing power of 9 trillion floating point operations per second as it attempted to automatically reroute a number of heavy transports threatened by several independent reports of unidentified intrusion into Gatwick airspace. Hewitt reached the milestone 200, the first time this had ever been achieved in the Mogs 55 year history, again requiring only 22 balls for his fourth fifty. His innings consisted of 17 Sixes and 15 Fours. At this point the Mogs declared on 263-2 with Ben Fairclough not out on 22 off 21 balls.
Ewhurst, who had responded to Hewitt's innings with polite and generous praise, were not going to be outdone in the day's proceedings and set off in confident pursuit of the target. The newly named Joe "The Off Break" Lewis and Abbott were unable to break the home side and whilst unlucky with a couple of chances were still nonetheless hit for 28 and 36 respectively without success. Briggs the Elder was equally unfortunate and went for 17 off 4 overs. Although the Mogs score was high enough to make victory for Ewhurst difficult, the Captain was keen to make inroads into their batting and brought Toby Briggs back for a second conventional spell after 4 overs of entertaining legspin which had brought him 1-19.
Briggs now demonstrated why he was the conqueror of Mark Waugh at the Priory's recent outing against Lashings with a masterful spell of controlled fast bowling which ripped the heart out of Ewhurst's batting and saw him end on excellent figures of 5-49. At the other end Matt Lewis tempted one of the batsmen out of his ground whereupon he was stumped and another gloved one to the keeper off Peter Furner, which meant that the home side were on 207-7 at the end of an extremely memorable day.
MWCC Stats