Fillongley Cricket Club

Handsworth 201-9, Filongley 125 all out

Another loss today at Handsworth, who now look strong favourites to take the championship. Bablake, their nearest rivals, lost heavily to Warwick today so Handsworth top the table for the first time. Their ground is set in a lovely Victorian park. It’s a place where all the players seem to have a smile on their faces, though the same isn’t necessarily true of their good ladies, some of whom you wouldn’t want to cross. The smiles may have something to do with the range of drinks on sale. Aside from Red Stripe there’s Guinness but not as we know it – Foreign Extra Stout (7.5%), and something called Magnum which is allegedly tonic wine but containing vitamins and minerals. It says shake the bottle before drinking (which is a bit odd for wine), and it also says 16.5%. It comes in recycled cough mixture bottles (possibly not washed out) and tastes like watered down Jagermeister with a subtle hint of benzaldehyde. In the Caribbean it isn’t even considered booze by the authorities, but there’s some evidence to the contrary!

Handsworth won the toss and batted. An early wicket brought Sonny Ahmed to the crease. He got 145 at Fillongley earlier in the season and according to the Handsworth scorer is not far short of 1000 for the season. Thankfully he was strangely quiet today, hitting just two boundaries in an innings of 33 off 78 balls. The other opener, Anton Johnson, is apparently only 15 but already the biggest bloke in a side made up mostly of big blokes. He put together an excellent innings of 87 off 130 balls which ultimately won the game and got him the man of the match vote. He isn’t the only decent youngster at Handsworth though. J Patel made a very good 29, took two catches and bowled left arm wrist spin getting plenty of turn. The last over from Binga brought a wicket and two run outs so at least we got full bowling points.

So on to our batting. You might want to stop reading here because it’s not good. Exrtras top scored again with 30. Chilly made 22 off 80 balls but will need to do something about the hole in his bat, and Binga made 17 off 58. Apart from that most of our bats struggled against spinners who actually spun the ball. The absence of a spinner in our side was exposed today.

Really I don’t want Handsworth to go up because I want to go there next year, but I think they will.