Out!

We had a cup match against a neighbouring village.  We haven't played them before because they are in Division 3 and we are in Division 6, so we were expecting to get trounced.  We did lose an early wicket, but Rich (41) and Al (56 not out) played really well to take us to 117/2 in our 16 overs.  In reply, we started off really well with one of the youngsters Luke taking two wickets in his first over, but they had some class batsmen who scored quite a few runs.  Whilst I was bowling, I saw the batsman at my end move out of his crease so I did what I thought you were supposed to do, which was to stop and ask the Umpire to give the batsman a warning that if he did it again I would remove the bails and he would be out.  The Umpire duly warned him, but what I wasn't expecting was their captain who was batting at the other end to launch a fierce four letter word tirade at me.  These days I'm less tolerant of bad behaviour so I walked down the pitch and asked him what he thought I was doing wrong.  After a few more expletives, his colleague at the other end suggested we got on with the game.  I had obviously unsettled him as two balls later I bowled him.  Such a beautiful sight and a wonderful feeling watching him smashing his bat on the ground swearing (again) very loudly as he reluctantly departed the pitch.  I bowled 3 overs and took 2 wickets for 18.  Given I came into the bowling attack when their two highest scoring players were in freeflow and I got them both out, I think I did really well.  We won't talk about the dropped catch when I was fielding at gully, but in my defence, the ball rocketed towards me at 100 mph with the sun directly behind it.  I did manage to get a hand to it, so stopped it going to the boundary, but I probably should have done better.  This photo is of Rich about to be caught on the boundary.  We gave a good show of ourselves and were gutted to lose the game on the very last ball of the match when they scrambled the two runs that they needed.  Damn it!