A youthful Leighton Buzzard 3rd team, with their oldest player aged 20, won the toss at Horton View and inserted the 4ths, with an average age of more than 30.
Banbury were quickly 1 down against the bottom of the table side but this brought the Chairman to the crease for his 1st league outing of the campaign to join Tommo. They put on 94 for the 2nd wicket which Tommo dominated and unsurprisingly there were few quick singles/2’s run in the partnership. Tommo was batting fluently at this time picking off the bad ball albeit not quite taking it in the middle of the bat all the time. He was joined at the crease by skipper Richard Lambden and together they put on a rapid 124 in about 12 overs before the skipper in another of his yes/no decisions decided to take the latter and stood his ground so Tommo was left stranded having scored 144, which was allegedly not his highest ever score. The skipper finished on 54 NO before declaring, having got Mitch to scan the rule book first, at 256 for 4 off 40 overs to allow Buzzard an extra 5 overs to pull off the unlikely victory.
Their reply started badly for Buzzard as they lost their first wicket, with 5 on the board, off the 1st ball of Clark Berry’s first over and they continued to lose regular wickets thereafter. They were eventually skittled out for 65 in 24 overs with only two batsman getting into double figures so Banbury won by 191 runs. The margin of victory could have been a lot more if a couple of sharp catches in the slips had been taken too. We only used 4 bowlers who only bowlied 3 extras in their innings. Justin Lambden was the pick of Banbury’s bowlers with figures of 5-0-23-4 but Mark Wright (8-2-21-2), Clark Berry (7-3-11-2) & Mark Pallett (4-0-8-2) all contributed.