New day brings a new game. Leaving the nice looking big blue to come out of your car in Utrecht and all of a sudden it’s 10 degrees colder and the sun is gone. Playing on grass where ACC just struggled to chase 105, we lost another toss. And this time we rightfully padded up to bat, so no issues there this time. Shabaz with again a new outfit, Nico Benoist making his debut and a deserved victory for the oldies in the warm-ups we were roaring to go.
After not having the best of starts we were 20/2 after about 4 or 5 overs. Timmie Weston still flying over from London town every weekend and Pauly D steadied the ship with a nice partnership. Pauly stranded on 30 odd with tim W still going strong and finished on 44. Batting wasn’t that easy we found out, but representing Yorkshire Benji thornton got stuck into both the wicketkeeper and after that a nice wee full toss of van der Harten that disappeared over the canal which brought us op to 115. A score probably just under par I thought. Kampong’s ideas of opening the batting in a T20 were quite clear with 12 runs coming of the 1st 4 balls. But with some stupid shot selection we managed to get 2 wickets in 2 balls which included a good carbon kamal catch by Timmie Weston. Kampong recovered quite well though by their saffer coach and were building to 60-2 when Farie broke the partnership. Kampong kept going, but we managed to create some dot balls by some good bowling from the spinners backed up by some good fielding in the inner ring. Kampong needing 24 of the last 4, 12 from the last 2 overs, it wasn’t looking good for us. But shabaz managed to reduce the score of the penultimate over and kampong needed 7 of the last over. Single, single, two, wicket(MASSIVE game change), dot ball, run out. Skipper got the boys home. Great team effort from the mighty men in red to defend 115. So the beers tasted well after the match, Timmie Weston back on the plane, Pauly D showing his affection for a tree and a lovely wee dinner at 1890 we ended a good days of play! Still right in the mixer for a place at finals day, with 2 crucial T20’s next weekend against VCC and Dosti (who btw just scored 216 on the weekend). Also we will travel down to Kampong again on thursday to kick of our 50 over campaign, with hopefully the same result. So busy weekend of cricket.
Hope to see you guys somewhere next week, safe travels to everyone(especially pauly)
EP

 

R&W - VRA Twenty/20

On a very cold morning in Haarlem, the mighty men of R&W 1 were looking to put themselves in a strong position on the T20 leader board. This meant we would have to play well against a strong VRA side which consisted of eight players from the national side. As Enoch was absent for the first game of the day, this meant Jaap Dickmann would take his place batting in the middle order. We batted first with Jazz and Bravo opening up. Unfortunately we didn’t get off the best of starts as Jazz was bowled by a ball that kept low in the first over. Enter Pete at three; he built a small partnership with Bravo before getting caught on a very low and slow wicket which was very hard to bat on. Tim Weston and Bravo pulled things back for us which included a huge six from Bravo. This partnership was broken when Bravo got frustrated at the wicket and tried to hit another one into the trees but ended up being bowled for a well constructed 40. Tim Weston ended up not out at the end on 33, again well batted Tim. We ended up on 107/4 after our 20 overs. With the nature of this wicket, we knew with some good fielding and tight bowling we could restrict VRA. As the Dutch team were flying out at 9, Peter Borren didn’t waste any time in getting the runs with 81 off 32 deliveries. We just simply didn’t bowl well enough, the only man with respectable figures Shahbaz 0-16 off 3 overs. We were hoping we would improve from this performance as we had our derby match against Bloemendaal in only a couple of hours. Which we did!
Benji

 

Rood&Wit vs VRA T20
In the freezing cold wind, with our own outdoor bar and some tunes we were keen as mustard to beat VRA. Losing the toss VRA put us in to bat on a wicket that was very hard to score on since we have had 3 weeks of shit weather. So battling as we do, shabaz(40) and Timmie Weston(33) got us to a 105, which was looking at the conditions a score that in our eyes was just about par. Obviously looking at the result Peter Borren thought elsewise, from the moment he came in(also helped by some poor bowling from us) he found the boundaries very frequently. After dropping 2 half chances and Borren still hitting the boundaries, the match as almost over. VRA got there with 10 wickets in hand with less than 10 overs to go. So a disappointing effort from us, but nothing much we could do when somebody has hit that kind of form.
The second match went much better. After some toss issues with both teams padding up we
started off well with the ball. We managed to restrict Bloemendaal from the start and we were basically on top most of our fielding innings. With Raoul wouters bowling very well(3-19-4) and Sverre(3-20-4) we managed to have bloemendaal 112/6/20. Now the time had really come for us to start padding up with Fulton and Shabaz opening and Jarrod dropping down the order for a bit. We started a bit more aggressive than the previous match but we lost a few wickets so we were not allowed to be as aggressive as we wanted to at 39/3. But once again Enoch and jarrod got us in a good position when Enoch perished we were 85/4. Jazz still going strong and a couple of good boundaries from our retired porn star Farie, we managed to get home in a thence ending with 3 balls to spare.
So 2 wins from 3 matches, with 4 games to go. Still right in for a place in semi’s, still al long way to go but were going be working hard to make sure we are there at finals day! Away on grass at Kampong at 16:30 to grab 2 points from Utrecht.
EP

 

R&W - Bloemendaal Twenty/20

Saturday was the second weekend of the 2012 season. Playing 2 very important matches against VRA as you just read and Bloemendaal. We lost the first game but had no time to deal with this as we all knew we had another big game coming up, playing our rivals Bloemendaal. Bloemendaal batting first were restricted to 112-6 with good bowling from our pace attack. Our skipper leading from the front took 3-19 and Raoul picked up 3-20. Last time we congratulated Enoch playing is 100th match for the first team, now I would like to congratulate Raoul by taking his first wicket for the first team. We started slowly in our chase. In the last 5 overs I think (I was put in charge of the music, so I lost the score at some stage) we needed 9 runs an over. Enoch and Jarrod (44 NO) started to accelerate. With just a couple of overs to go Enoch left the middle and Farie took over. All the experience was now in the middle for Rood en Wit. We started the last over with 7 runs to win. First ball was a single. So 6 runs needed from 5 balls. It looked like it was going to be a nail biter. But Farie was thinking something else and decided to hit the ball out of the ground, which meant we won the first out of three games against Bloemendaal!!! We saw some young energy leading the bowling attack during the win and I think we saw how important experience can be in batting. So for all the youngsters, I hope you learned a lesson from the old-timers, and you take this in your game for the rest of the season.
Hope to see all of you during the 2012 season,
Paul van Meekeren JR