Venturers Vs Bristol Academicals, Wednesday April 30th

Bristol Academicals 141-6 (20), Venturers 144-4 (19.2)

Play-Cricket Results

On a gloriously warm and sunny evening, the 2025 Venturers season started with a game against Bristol Academicals at the increasingly run-down Sulis club.
This season the university is only providing an artificial wicket at Sulis, and the outfield having been used for football during the winter, was pretty uneven.
Even so, everyone seemed happy to be playing cricket again after the long winter off, and the ground presented a pretty picture once the boundary had been marked with flags, and the stumps had been made to stand almost upright in the artificial wicket.

Dinesh, acting as Venturers captain in place of the injured Imran, lost the toss and Bristol elected to bat first. With the light going to fade fast, it was agreed we would bowl 10 overs from one end, before switching ends for the final 10 overs in order to speed things along.

Bristol made a slow but steady start against Muhammad and William, and as the scoring started to pick-up, they started to lose wickets steadily, first to Muhammad with Hemendra taking a smart catching behind the stumps, and then to Dinesh, Joji, and Ajeet who all rattled the timbers.
After this flurry of wickets, Bristol were able to push on, with Bristol’s Luke in particular becoming increasingly brutal, despatching all bowlers to the boundary. This occasionally resulted in a search for the ball lost in undergrowth but on each occasion, it was eventually located. Bruce and William both took a bit of tap from a batman who was well set, but in truth so did everyone else who had a go too, and Bristol suddenly had a very competitive total of 141 runs from their 20 overs. At the innings change we wondered if Dinesh had been wise to turn down the Bristol captains offer at about the 12 over stage of reverting to an 18 over game.

The Venturers innings was started by Rob and Siddhant, who managed to keep the scoreboard ticking over at about the required rate, mainly thanks to extras in the case of Rob who looked horribly rusty.
As Siddhant looked increasingly assured at the crease and started to hit boundaries, Rob was just starting to get bat on ball when he was bowled once he missed with his attempt to dispatch some flighted spin.
Hemenda, and Stephen both scored a couple of quick runs, before each got out. Hemenda to a neat catch, while Stephen gloved a lifting delivery behind.
Ghulame joined Siddhant at the crease and both looked comfortable, each hitting some tasty boundary stokes, including a six each on a pretty decently sized boundary.
As the light increasingly faded, we agreed to switch to a pink ball when the original was lost in the hedge, and that made seeing things a good deal easier.
The Venturers were still keeping up with the required rate, with both of the now in batsmen scoring at better than a run a ball, and so the scorers started shouting out what was needed to win.
As a win got within touching distance Ghulame was bowled, to be replaced Joji, who ignored the fading light to hit a few nice shots of his own.
Both Siddhant and Joji were cool under the pressure of declining balls left, and a flurry of nice boundary shots from Siddhant got the Venturers over the line with 4 balls to spare, Siddhant unbeaten on 73 from just 57 balls and Joji of 7 from 9. An impressive first win of the 2025 season to go with the great weather!