Match Report

White City vs Horningsham

Sept 11 2011

Peter [Oborne] managed to arrange a team of 13 to turn up in Horningsham for this game. Horningsham suffered late drop outs and were 10 (we thought) so Tubby, captaining the White City in Peter’s absence in Moscow, lent them George Oborne.
By mid afternoon we realised that Horningsham had miscounted and, worse, one of their players who was expected to be late, never turned up. So they had only 9 players including George, but no matter.

Tubby felt confident enough of a large Zimbabwean and youth element to bat first. Mitch the Zim and Nik Darlington opened. The Horningsham attack was led by 16 year old Christy 0'Connor and James Oborne.

Nik survived a close LBW appeal on Oborne’s first ball, when the umpire gave it not out caught behind, in itself a correct decision. But he was bowled 2 overs later going back to a full length ball, and went off telling his team mates that the bowler, Oborne, was rubbish and it was a rubbish ball. These compliments were passed back to the bowler by the incoming bat.

Shortly the first and only heavy rain shower of the afternoon intervened. Mitch seemed unsettled by it and tried to pull a ball from Christy to the short square boundary; it was too full and bowled him, hitting the very top of middle and leg. Play was suspended for a few minutes until the rain cleared. Happily this was the only rain break of the afternoon but it seemed to change the pitch, which began to skid and keep low occasionally. Batsmen saw demons in it.

In the over after the resumption a full length ball scuttled the other Zim. The bowler, Oborne, generously suggested the umpire should call it a no ball, which he did – no one has come all the way from Zimbabwe to be out like that - preventing what would have been the only White City wicket directly attributable to bad bounce. But the uncertainty inhibited batsmen for the rest of the afternoon.

The sun then tried to come out and Christy began to find outrageous late swing. Someone left a ball outside off stump and was clean bowled middle. Tony Oakshett, batting cautiously in his first and only match of the season, saw his chance to attack a wide half volley, but the ball veered in at the last moment and took an inside edge onto off stump.

White City were 11 for 4. Callum Widdows, who normally opens the bowling, came on at the pavilion end to bowl leg spin. Someone made an unwise attempt to cross bat a looping yorker. Davenport made some unwise remarks about Callum’s quicker ball before losing his off stump to it. Then Nik Darlington, doing a substitute fielding stint, was put in the awkward position of having to catch a team mate, and found no means to avoid it. Christy continued to bowl magnificently and was kept on until he took his fourth wicket. George Oborne replaced him at the Far End, and bowled a lively spell, during which he dismissed Alex Beard with a good yorker, which is becoming one of his trade mark deliveries; he alternates it with the leg side 5 wides.

White City were struggling to set a competitive total when Horningsham’s Robert Stern came to the rescue. He joined us about 2 hours late with the croaky voice and tired appearance of a man who had been up till 4 am in London filming a 'chess boxing' event for Japanese TV, had overslept and missed his train. Horningsham put him straight on to bowl and the runs finally began to flow. Yet the wickets were not stemmed. In the emergency, George Oborne was lent back, briefly, to the White City to bolster their batting. He holed out off Robert at deep mid wicket, well snaffled by Tom Evans. Paul Grugeon took a rare wicket. Eventually the 11th wicket fell (Christy O’Connor’s fifth) and White City had succumbed, 93 all out.

The redeeming feature of a total like that is that it can lure the team batting second into false optimism. Angus Hilleary is the model of a cautious and respectful captain, averse to the risk and implied insult of reversing the batting order. Indeed Horningsham hardly has a batting order to reverse. But on this occasion, even with only 9 batsmen, it seemed appropriate to mix it up. Fate was tempted and could not resist.

Alex Beard and Oz (Tim Razzell's son-in-law) worked the conditions perfectly, dead on line, some lateral movement, exploiting the little inconsistencies in the bounce. Alex struck Christy O’Connor’s front pad repeatedly, and looked by turns bewildered and forlorn as one after another of his many LBW appeals was turned down, on clearly articulated grounds, by the Horningsham umpire. So it took a few overs for the first wicket to come. But once the resistance was broken, Alex and Oz and then William Sitwell ripped through Horningsham in a chaos of cartwheeling stumps and incontrovertible LBW decisions.

Sitwell is a dramatically improved player. He took 8 wickets on tour against Galway this summer. And he bowled the best ball of the day, stuffing Angus Hilleary with a loopy slow medium leg break that landed middle and leg, turned with vicious lift and hit the top off. He was later to prove it was no fluke by bowling the same ball to J Oborne, though that one unfortunately would turn and lift too much and miss the stumps. G Oborne was clean bowled to a hideous swipe that he claimed was a defensive shot. Horningsham were about 60 for 7, last man in, 30 odd to win.

Last man was James Oborne, joining the rock that is David O'Connor. O’Connor – an expert in medieval stained glass windows - is one of the few players in the current Horningsham team who was playing back in the golden era of the Pennys and Trollopes. His crab like shuffle up the wicket is a familiar sight in the Horningsham fixture. This pair ground down the target, but then disaster struck. For only the second time in the day, a ball failed to bounce off the ground and O’Connor was irrefutably plumb LBW to Jack Howard. Horningsham were about 70 for 8, all out. The congratulations and consolations began, but were cut short. There was to be one final twist.

Tubby insisted we should recall one batsman. White City had lent George to Horningsham for the game. Horningsham had lent him back to the White City in their batting crisis. The White City would reciprocate by letting George bat twice for Horningsham in theirs. It was an offer made in the best tradition of White City sportsmanship, loosely to be defined as trying under all circumstances to lose. Moreover, though Tubby would never have stooped to such a low calculation, the cold fact was that George’s aggregate return of three runs in his two innings so far suggested that the gesture might not represent a great risk.

So the result of the match finally came to depend on the performance of two Obornes, uncle and nephew, players equally at home in a White City jersey or Horningsham shirt. And with scoreboard showing two to win, it was George, in his third innings of this unusual match, who struck the winning four for Horningsham.
James Oborne