Friendly Match - 40 Overs

New Ash Green 200-8
Meopham 206-7
New Ash Green lost by 3 wickets.

The script of the last two year's Meopham cricket week games was spoilt when Pete Burke won the toss and chose to bat. The weather might have supported this decision, and pitch inspection suggested a good wicket, but in fact the pitch started crumbling immediately and proved difficult to play shots on. Fortunately Meopham's opening bowlers, particularly Robinson, failed to exploit the conditions and New Ash Green were able to get away to a comfortable start with an opening stand of 44 before Matthew Quantrill's run of 3 successive centuries against Meopham was ended by a ball that didn't get more than 4 inches off the ground after bouncing. With Matt Scanlan making 31 and Pete Burke 45 the foundations were laid for a big score, but with the wicket still unpredictable, but mostly low and slow, acceleration was difficult. Kevin Ginn made 28 and Shane Hampsheir also made 28 not out, including his first ever 6 and the score crept up to 200 from the last ball of the innings.

New Ash Green started well in defence of the total, with Kevin Ginn and Micky Sumner reducing Meopham to 11-3 during an initial spell of 4 overs each. Thereafter though things went downhill. Marc Klus struggled with no balls, including one where he bowled the batsman, catches went down and run outs were missed, culminating in a farcical miss when the batsman crawled half the length of the pitch on his hands and knees after slipping over and still the fielders couldn't get the ball back to the stumps. These misses were costly because although a century stand for the 4th wicket had put Meopham in a strong position once Kevin Ginn had bowled Darren Deekes the wickets had started to fall again, and if the missed chances had been taken New Ash Green would probably have won. As it was the batsman known as Jacky Chan (no idea what his real name was!) having been missed a couple of times carried Meopham to victory in dramatic fashion after 4 byes had seemed to make it impossible for him to reach his century when he levelled the scores with a 4, leaving him on 94, then hit Pete Burke's slower ball over the road to win the match and bring up his century - although a check on the scorebook later suggested he might have only made 99!

Oh yeah, one last thing - Kevin was keen to make sure that the fact that he took 4-39 was recorded!