1^st XI Captain Jaime Waring’s thoughts on the first month of the season.

May has seen an indifferent start to the 1^st XI’s life in County Division 4. An opening day win vs Witcombe filled the team with confidence, even if Dave, Jon and Phil got lost and left us fielding with 8 men for 5 overs?! The following week saw a damp Minch wicket yield just 160 runs in total as Langford scraped home by 1 wicket in a low scoring thriller. Game 3 saw the best game yet as we reached 170, myself and Big Dave Cruickshank adding 50 for the 9th wicket to give us a good score, but once again the game was decided on the final ball as Chalford got home by 3 wickets…the morale was low after this one with the boys knowing they were 2 balls away from winning 3 games on the spin.  However 2 defeats in a row for the first time in 2 years was hard to take. A T20 victory vs Haresfield was a confidence boost, with Jack, Benoy, Matt and Tom all stepping up from 2^nd XI duty to win us the game…but an embarrassing defeat vs Cirencester was a real down moment. Our batting as a whole has been poor, but showed the first signs of an upturn last Saturday away to Haresfield when we almost chased down 230, agonisingly falling 3 runs short of beating the top of the table side away from home.  We have a long way to go so all is not lost, we have 3 months of cricket still to go so keep a positive outlook, as we could still do very well in this league!