Twickenham U9s played out an entertaining encounter with local rivals Teddington on 25 July. The visitors from Bushy Park ultimately won by 38 runs, but the Ts can be proud of the way that they kept at it and put Teddington under pressure (see here for the card). Decent effort all round.

Batting much improved
On 23 July the Ts played Indian Gymkhana. Things didn’t really go to plan and Twickenham were ultimately well beaten.

48 hours later the result may have been the same, but the Ts put in a much better all-round performance. And, if development and improvement is the real aim of the game, then it was a successful evening for all concerned.

Teddington won the toss and asked Twickenham to have first hit. The new, re-shuffled batting order saw Harvir Ghere and Jaden Mate open up, and both registered a boundary apiece in what was a pretty solid opening stand.

Paarth Vaswani and Max Fernandes then dug in and did their level best to make sure nothing got past them, before Austin Tilzey and Noah Lemos got the scoreboard ticking with some sharp running between the wickets.

Samuel Allen was the man who really injected a bit of momentum into proceedings, slapping the ball hard and straight and indeed to the boundary. The Ts started to generate a bit of momentum.

Stan and Vince Hough then finished things off with the some decent pull shots and some sharp running between the wickets. The twins took the Ts up to a perfectly respectable 245. Crucially, the Ts had five fewer dismissals than they did against Indian Gym. Progress indeed.

Just too much for the bowlers to do
Teddington started their response relatively slowly. Harvir Ghere bowled impressively and he was good value for his 2-8. Samuel Allen also got the ball pretty straight, as the Ts illustrated that they were going to give defending their total a good go.

Jake Greenberg and Max Basher picked things up in the middle for Teddington, as, slowly but surely, the visitors made progress. The crucial thing was the lack of dismissals. A couple of catches went down, a couple of run out calls were very close…..but things didn’t quite seem to fall Twickenham’s way. Such is the wonderful game of cricket.

Seb Gair certainly did his level best to get Twickenham back into things. He started with a maiden and then took a wicket for just one run in his second over. Still, Vince Hough and Jaden Mate, the last of the bowling pairs, knew that they’d have to bowl out of their respective skins to get the Ts home.

They most certainly gave it all they had. Mate took two wickets (and indeed a truly amazing catch running back from mid off), but even though Hough (version V) kept things tight he just couldn’t get anything moving in the wickets-taken column.

Teddington subsequently got home with something to spare. But, Twickenham pushed them. Play out a few more of those straight balls and catch just a few more of the chances that come their way, and next time round it might well be closer still.