Thankfully the oppo arrives and put up a couple of gazebos. We won the toss and naturally decided to have a bat.

McGurn and Merilaht got us off to a decent start, putting on 70 for the first wicket and negotiating some good bowling on a surprisingly slow and low pitch. Merilaht looked all touch and class before unfortunately falling to one that stuck in the pitch.

That triggered the first of a couple of collapses on the day, with numbers three, four and five contributing a combined nine runs. Enter Edmonds, fresh back from Hastings and kindly helping us out for the day, Harry began dispatching the spinners to all parts of South East London. One particular shot bouncing off the rear window of a car parked at long on. Whoever decided to leave their car unattended at Long on that day clearly had not checked Pitchero and seen Edmonds back in the Xi.

After a fair few overs of spin through the middle period, Burgess brought back their opening bowler, Rasool, who got to work removing McGurn, Edmonds, Jain and Cobbett in quick succession.

We eventually finished on 180 all out, with around five overs left unused. I think everyone considered we were probably 60 runs short of par on that deck. But by no means were we out of the contest, we had a stacked bowling line up.

Before the chase got underway, a quick nod to the Burgess Park tea. Biryani and fresh fruit went down a treat.Defending 180, we knew we'd need to be on it in the field. Safe to say we were not on it in the field.

We eventually finished the day having dropped 8 chances. At one point we even managed a hat trick of drops off their opener. It was really quite hard to understand, the bowlers bowled, the batters hit it in the air and we just simply refused to hold on to them. Every life we handed out made the chase a little easier. We kept plugging away in the heat and never stopped fighting, but you can only give a side so many chances before they eventually will just drag themselves over the line.

One lovely moment came on the day for Benny Cobbett, who picked up his first wicket for the 1st XI and in doing so claimed his 100th wicket for the club. A fantastic achievement and one that deserves plenty of love. The celebration on frogbox is quite good too.

There are no great mysteries to solve from Saturday. We were out batted, out bowled, out fielded and quite simply out played.

On to the next one.

Plough On

Match report from Sean McGurn