Players journey home

By Darren Gosling
June 15 2011

Oh dear. Darren reports on yesterdays debacle for Middlesex. He tells it exactly like it was and this does not make very good reading for us.  Read on if you are brave enough.

Both teams came into this match with just a solitary win but both would have been looking for a second victory to reignite their stalling T20 campaign.

In this fixture last season the Panthers racked up their highest ever T20 score of 213 and largest victory margin of 84 runs, so no doubt the Dragons were also looking to revenge this heavy defeat.

Sadly for the Panthers none of the five batsmen (Warner, Gilchrist, Shah, Morgan & Malan) who scored all 200 runs to come from the bat were in the Panthers line-up. The Dragons came into the match without their leading runs scorer and wicket taker  this season, with batsmen Rees and bowler Harris both out injured.

They did however still have in their line-up the Aussie Mark Cosgrove, who with 822 T20 runs for Glamorgan was looking to pass David Hemp (862) as Glamorgan’s all time leading runs scorer in this competition.

Dexter won the toss and elected to bat first.

Stirling and Rogers opened the innings for the Panthers while Owen (Pagoda End) and Wagg (Town End) opened the bowling for the Dragons.

The third ball of the innings was dispatched by Stirling over the long off boundary for a six, which landed inside the score box. Sadly this proved to be the only six of the entire match and probably the peak of the Panthers innings.

Stirling added just three further singles before playing a grotesque looking shot, swatting the ball to Petersen to leave the Panthers10-1.

Crook came in next and hit one boundary before having a huge swish at a Wagg delivery and feathered the ball to Wallace behind the stumps to leave the Panthers 23-2, with Rogers remaining steady and looking to anchor the innings.

With Dexter now joining Rogers, the Panthers hit their straps and doubled their score in the two remaining power play overs to take the score to 46-2.

In the 8^th over with the score on 58-2 the Panthers were looking set for a score of somewhere in the region of 150 but then things all went very horribly wrong.

In fifteen seasons of watching Middx, the common theme of spectacular batting collapses has been the complete ineptitude at playing spin.

Owais Shah was far and away our best player of spin throughout this period and unfortunately just how much Ace carried us in this area was painfully evident for all to see in this match.

The Dragons having realised how poor the Panthers were at playing spin proceeded to bowl spin through all the remaining fourteen post power play overs, during which the Panthers scored 44-8 collapsing to 102 all out – our lowest ever T20 total.

Rogers chipped a simple catch to Petersen, Dexter was bowled trying to turn the ball away to the leg side, Newman was also bowled, Simpson picked out the fielder (Wright) at mid wicket, Dalrymple was stumped off of Croft’s bowling, Smith played the same shot as Rogers, McLaren was bowled by Wagg and finally Murtagh bowled by Petersen.

As the gentleman sitting two seats to my right said “At least half a dozen of those shots would have embarrassed a schoolboy”. Enough said.

So the Dragons began their reply with Cosgrove and Petersen opening the innings and Crook (Pagoda End) and Murtagh (Town End) opening the bowling.

The Panthers got off to the perfect start with Crook knocking over Cosgrove’s stumps with the very first ball of the innings. Cosgrove was left looking disbelievingly at his wrecked wicket having deliberately left the ball.

Again, sadly this was about as good as it got for the Panthers.

Though the Dragons finished the powerplay overs worse off than the Panthers had on 39-3 (as opposed to 46-2), Alviro Petersen was looking very solid and had scored most of the Dragons runs so far. Petersen with Mark Wallace then put on 29 for the fourth wicket before falling to the medium pace of Dexter. But with the score on 59-4 Petersen had already laid the foundation for victory, Wallace then guided the Dragons home with a steady knock of 40 not out with almost three overs to spare.

Two further wickets including one more from the excellent McLaren who finished with admirable figures of 3-0-7-3 did not disguise the fact just how badly beaten the Panthers were.

Some will argue that the pitch was sub standard for a game at this level, but a look at the two teams spin bowling clearly points to where the real problem was.

Glamorgan spin 14-1-56-8

Middlesex  spin   7-0-37-0

The last straw for me was when the seamer Graham Wagg returned for his second spell and decided to bowl spin instead – talk about taking the p**s!

To rub salt in the wounds we then heard that Ollie Rayner had taken a T20career best of 5-18, he along with every other spinner in the South group must be eagerly awaiting the opportunity to further improve their career averages against the Panthers.

I know the club were very clear at the beginning of the season that promotion from Div 2 is the priority this season, but supporters deserve to see better performances in the T20 than this. Even allowing for injuries to Malan & Berg (two hugely key players) performances so far have been exceptionally poor.

The worry for me is the damage to confidence that a 16 game (largely losing) campaign will do to the team. Despite a fantastic start to the season in the Championship, the fact is we haven’t actually won a game since April.

Spare a thought too for Anthony Ireland who faced just one ball, wasn’t asked to bowl  and spent the game fielding on the boundary. The poor guy must have wondered why he bothered turning up at all…..along with the rest of us.