Welcome, gentlemen and players, to the third instalment of Trashes to Ashes, a serial blog following my player avatar through the Career mode of Cricket 19, starting at the bottom in club cricket and working all the way up to the most prestigious competition in the sport - the Ashes test series between England and Australia. For full details on the scope and aims of this series, be sure to check out the first post by following this link.

In this entry, we progress to the second round of fixtures in our first club cricket season. Can Aldbury continue on their winning streak, and will we be able to keep building on our opening performances by taking a few more wickets and scoring a few more runs? Read on to find out...

Part Three - Old Friends and Close Calls

11th May, 2019

Today brought the start of our second three-day game of the season, a home fixture against Pitstone. Having beaten them in our Twenty20 meeting last week, I think most of the team were quietly confident about our chances. However, there was definitely a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the players as a result of the "captaincy coup" Dan Reece briefed me about on Thursday night. There's no real outright hostility towards Michael O'Brien (understandable, since questioning his authority would pretty much guarantee being dropped from the team), but there was a level of discomfort in the changing room this morning that I hadn't felt in previous games. We'd had a lot of rain through the week, meaning our pitch was in its usual state - soft, grassy, and a little waterlogged. The rain has also brought the temperature down, giving us a cooler, windier, more overcast backdrop for today's fixture. O'Brien went out to the middle to toss the coin, but he lost the toss and Pitstone put us in to bowl.

The difference in O'Brien's style of captaincy was very apparent to me, since he seemed to hold off from giving me a shot with the ball for as long as humanly possible. He eventually brought me on in the 47th over, with Pitstone having struggled to 163 runs at the cost of eight wickets. I found myself pitted against Alejandro Ethan, one of Pitstone's better bowlers, and quickly spotted he was moving across his stumps a lot to try and get the ball away on the on side. I spent the next few overs trying to trap him LBW, but despite a couple of good shouts, I was denied by the umpire and he managed to hang on to his wicket. My four-over spell was short and sweet, brought to an end not by O'Brien directly, but instead by Dan Reece, who managed to take the two remaining wickets in quick succession at the other end. I may not have taken a wicket, but conceded just six runs, preserving my impressive bowling economy. Pitstone ended up all out for 172 runs, with only Justin Slater managing a half-century thanks to his top-scoring 62. The pick of our players was definitely Benjamin English, who took four wickets for just 33 runs across his eleven overs.

With half a day's play remaining, the teams swapped and we began our first innings with the bat, looking to overtake Pitstone's 172. I was shocked to learn from Michael O'Brien that he'd moved me up the order to fifth, a promotion that I didn't feel I'd earned based on my first two innings, and which I suspect was made more to undermine Felix Caratelli by demoting him to a position below the unproven new guy. It wasn't long before I found myself taking to the middle, as an early collapse saw us lose our first three wickets for just 16 runs. O'Brien was down at the non-striker's end, and appeared rather frustrated by the top order's lacklustre performance. My mind conjured up memories of a story my dad used to tell me about the time Aldbury were all out for just 10 runs, by far the club's worst ever batting performance, and I began to wonder if this match would end up becoming my version of that story. Feeling a certain amount of weight on my shoulders from the responsibility of trying to steady the ship and prevent an embarrassing rout, I took my guard and prepared to face my first ball.

The first runs are always the hardest to score, in my opinion, so getting off the mark is never not a huge relief. My first runs today came from a full ball drifting down the leg side, which I was able to glance off my pads for a quick single. The following over, I pushed another full delivery back between mid-off and cover for four, scoring my first boundary for Aldbury and moving my score up to 5. I kept pushing the ball into gaps, taking singles and ticking up my total, while O'Brien consistently found the boundaries needed to push us towards a more respectable total. As I moved into double digits for the first time this season with a well-placed cover drive, I felt my confidence growing. Trying to keep my head level, I told myself that we still had plenty of time and there was no rush or pressure to score quickly.

I kept pushing the ball around the pitch, taking the odd single run and sometimes making it back for two, until Pitstone brought their spinners into their bowling attack. I tend to struggle against spin bowling, mainly because the slower speeds make it harder to time the ball well, and more effort is needed to get the ball away from the wicket and into the gaps. It was practically destined that the left-handed wrist spinner Caleb Simon would claim my scalp, and the inevitable happened as I tried to sweep a full, flighty delivery. I mistimed my shot, the ball straightened with its rotation as it pitched in line, and trapped me on my pad for an easy LBW decision for the umpire. I returned to the pavilion with 19 runs to my name, happy with my best score of the season, but frustrated for giving my wicket away so easily. I grabbed a quick shower back in the pavilion, then returned to the side of the pitch to watch the rest of the day's play.

12th May, 2019

We resumed play on Sunday on 174 runs, putting us marginally ahead of Pitstone with a handful of wickets remaining to try and improve that lead. We ended up lasting until just before lunch, with a score of 246 all out. O'Brien, to his credit, put in a phenomenal performance with the bat, scoring 150 of those 246 runs by himself and giving us a small lead of 74 runs going into the second innings. As much as I take issue with the underhanded way he secured the captaincy, there's no denying that he led by example in this innings and almost single-handedly dug us out of a potentially very deep hole.

Pitstone's second innings trajectory seemed to match their first pretty closely, as did O'Brien's captaincy in the field. Once again I came into the bowling attack later than I might have done under Dan's leadership, being given the ball in the 28th over with Pitstone on 111 runs and seven wickets down. With a lead of just 37 runs and only three wickets left to take, it seemed like we were on track to replicate our two-day result against Long Marston, but as luck would have it, Pitstone's lower order had other ideas and proved far more resilient than expected. My spell in this second innings lasted just five overs and much like my first innings performance, was cheap but unremarkable. The closest I came to a wicket in this innings was an appeal for caught behind against Caleb Simon, a wicket that perhaps I was a little too desperate to take in the name of revenge for my own dismissal - Phoenix Yates indicated that the ball I thought had carried through to his gloves was actually a bump ball, and I halted my appeal. O'Brien took me off and I didn't see the ball again for the rest of the innings.

Pitstone's last three wickets ended up earning the team a further 91 runs, putting them on a total of 202 and giving us a target of 129 to win the match. While again our opening batsmen struggled to get us off to a good start, O'Brien steadied the ship by coming in at number 3 and continuing where he left off in the first innings. Play closed today at 107 runs for 2 wickets, putting us just 22 runs away from victory and making the third day's play tomorrow feel like a mere formality.

13th May, 2019

As predicted, I needn't have bothered showing up today. O'Brien resumed play like there had been no overnight interruption and knocked out the remaining runs in just a few overs, securing Aldbury our second win in the three-day format so far this season. With today's play totalling less than twenty minutes, I think we spent more time setting everything up and then putting it all away than we did actually playing cricket. However, the time spent on both of those things pales in comparison to the amount of time we spent in the pub celebrating afterwards...

18th May, 2019

Our second one-day game of the season is a fixture I've been particularly looking forward to. We're hosting Mentmore, another of my dad's old teams, which means I'll hopefully be seeing a lot of folks that I haven't seen in years - I'm particularly keen to catch up with their captain Eli Sunny, their wicketkeeper Austin Downs, and their bowler Landon Birkett, whose wife would let me help her score when I used to come and watch my dad play in home games. Make no mistake though, I won't be pulling any punches by going easy on these guys. I'm not the only one who seems excited to play this week, either - I think Michael's performance last week has won over a lot of the doubters in the team, making the atmosphere in the changing room seem much more positive today.

O'Brien once again lost the toss, and Sunny decided to put us in to bat. I've always thought winning the toss at Aldbury must be an undesirable position to be in. Our pitch is invariably grassy and soft, and thus better suited to the bowling side, with today being no exception. However, a lot of the Aldbury players are used to those conditions, and so feel more comfortable batting here than others might. The opposition captain must therefore choose between trying to set a target on a pitch that favours the bowling side, or trying to take advantage of the conditions while putting us in to bat on a pitch we're familiar with. Bowling is probably the better choice, but it's definitely a bit of a catch twenty-two situation.

Once again O'Brien put me in the number five spot on the batting line-up, although thankfully I wasn't called upon quite as early as I was in last week's game. We were in the thirteenth over with 61 runs on the board when Abraham Peters managed to run himself out, signalling my turn to bat. O'Brien was initially my partner in the middle, but he almost immediately gave his wicket away LBW at the other end. Trying not to let it deter me, I pushed the ball through the covers to get off the mark. I'm not sure if it was a psychological thing, what with knowing half the players in the field, but I really struggled to keep my strike rate up initially. Thankfully Felix Caratelli held things up well at the other end, ticking the score over while I tried to find some rhythm, and eventually it came, its arrival heralded by a wonderful square cut that penetrated the inner circle of fielders and raced away to the boundary for four.

Felix and I continued to tick over the score, albeit probably not as quickly as we should have done given the limited overs format. I saw us into triple figures, bringing up the 100 for the team with another shot square of the wicket, and by the end of the 25th over Aldbury had accrued 104 runs for the loss of four wickets. Unfortunately, that was where my contribution to the innings ended. While trying to drive a full ball back towards the bowler Carlos Faulkner, I misread the line and feathered the ball through to the wicketkeeper with the finest of edges. I returned to the pavilion with 17 runs to my name, and with Aldbury looking in trouble. Mercifully, our wicketkeeper Phoenix Yates turned things around, putting in an incredible quick-fire innings and scoring 95 runs to land Aldbury on a total of 257 runs at the end of our fifty allotted overs, for the loss of eight wickets. In any context, that's a great score in one-day club cricket, but taking into account the pitch conditions and our very slow start, it wouldn't be unfair to call it miraculous.

Mentmore didn't seem particularly enthused about the prospect of chasing down a total of 258 to win on such a bowler-friendly pitch, and they got off to an unsurprisingly slow start. My own start came a little quicker than last week though, when O'Brien tossed me the ball in the 9th over with Mentmore on 31 for 2. My first spell lasted five overs and might be the tightest spell I've ever bowled. Two of those five overs were maidens and I only conceded a total of four runs from the other three. Most of my spell was spent bowling at none other than Carlos Faulkner, who appeared incredibly uncomfortable at the crease and whose wicket I was determined to take in order to avenge my own dismissal. Unfortunately, despite some tight and consistent bowling (and Faulkner's obvious discomfort), I wasn't able to force him into a critical error before O'Brien brought my first spell to an end.

My second spell, on the other hand, might be the most frustrating handful of overs I've ever bowled. I returned to the bowling attack in the 30th over with Mentmore on 122 runs, five wickets down, with Carlos Faulkner still at the crease and still looking uncomfortable despite accruing 41 runs. I set about trying to repeat the success of my first spell, but instead of the ball finding its way past Faulkner and into Phoenix's gloves, this time it seemed like the ball was being magnetically drawn to the edges of his bat. These edges would either drop just short of a potential catch, or else find a way through the gaps in the slip cordon and race away to the boundary for an undeserved four runs. It is intensely frustrating as a bowler to know that you're doing everything right, forcing the batsman to make errors, and yet he's still getting the better of you through little more than sheer dumb luck. Those four overs went for 19 runs, and again failed to bring a wicket, making this the second match in a row where I'd failed to claim a batsman's scalp - pretty disappointing given the excellent start I had to the season with eight wickets in my first three games.

At the end of my second spell, Mentmore were within 100 runs of their target. Thankfully some excellent late-game bowling from Tucker Lam (four wickets for 43 runs from his ten overs, including the dismissal of Carlos Faulkner on 90) prevented them from getting over the finish line. Mentmore's tail end capitulated in the 49th over with the team on 241 runs, just 17 away from a potential victory. The win, however slim it may have been, goes to us, and keeps us unbeaten in all formats going forward. It was a very close-fought thing, and sets the stage for what will hopefully be an equally enthralling contest when we meet again in our Twenty20 match next week.

25th May, 2019

Today saw us returning to the Aldbury Recreation Ground for the third week in a row, once again hosting Mentmore, albeit this time for a Twenty20 format game. Everyone on both sides seemed in pretty good spirits at the start of the day - since last week's contest had come right down to the wire, there was a general feeling in the air that anything could happen in today's game. In a repeat of the events of the previous week, Eli Sunny won the toss and put us in to bat first on what was a near-identical pitch. As it turns out, the similarities between last week's game and this wouldn't stop there.

In his continuing efforts to undermine Felix, O'Brien kept me at the number five spot, and once again he was my batting partner when our third wicket fell and I made my way into the middle to join him. We had made an impressive 55 runs off the first five overs, and looked set to post an easily-defended total. I added my name to the scorecard with my first shot, a well-timed leg glance that trickled down to fine leg for two runs. Knowing O'Brien to be in good form, and also aware of my own tendency to score slowly, I decided to focus on putting the ball into gaps and letting our captain do the heavy lifting at the other end. This strategy worked well for the next ten overs, seeing us first pass 100 runs for the team, then O'Brien making his half-century, and our partnership also reaching 50, all within the space of a few balls.

Unfortunately our luck turned in the 17th over, when O'Brien called for an unnecessary single to try and rotate the strike with two balls still to go in the over. Trusting his judgement, I set off on the twenty-two-yard dash, but the fielder at mid-off was up and on the ball in no time, and landed a direct hit on the stumps at the end O'Brien was running to. He returned to the pavilion with a score of 74, leaving the team four wickets down on 134 runs, and me facing the next delivery. This was when my luck ran out too - seeing the short ball early, I rocked onto my back foot and rolled my wrists into a pull shot, trying to clear the inner circle of fielders. Unfortunately I was on it a fraction too early and instead of making a beeline for the boundary, the ball dropped comfortably into the hands of the fielder at midwicket. In another eerie parallel of last week's match, I was leaving the field with a score of 17 runs.

Our final total for the innings was 165 runs at the cost of seven wickets - not a terrible total, but maybe fifteen or twenty runs short of what we might have hoped to be defending. Mentmore started a little better than they did last week, posting 67 runs in their first nine overs and leaving themselves in a good position moving into the game's final quarter. O'Brien passed me the ball at the start of the tenth over, with Eli Sunny on strike and his partnership with Levi Healy fast approaching 50. I managed to pin Eli back, bowling full and straight to force him into driving down the pitch and into the path of mid-off and mid-on. In the final ball of the over, I finally forced the error, luring him into misreading the line of the ball and trapping him LBW on the back foot while attempting to glance it off his pads. It felt bittersweet to dismiss a man who I spent so much time watching alongside my own dad years ago, but equally it felt like an "arrival" moment for me, as if I'd proven that I could hold my own against the big boys. It also brought an end to my dry spell following two matches without a wicket, and with a wicket-maiden no less - something that's almost unheard of in the T20 format.

Unfortunately that's about all there is to say about my bowling today. I came close to taking a second wicket in the third over, when the ball beat the bat and passed over the stumps, missing them by a matter of millimetres. My second and fourth overs were pretty expensive, pushing me up to a total of 17 runs conceded in my spell. Mentmore closed out their innings on 159 runs with six wickets lost, handing us the victory by a narrow margin of just six runs. Alan Fisher was the pick of our bowlers, taking two wickets for 27 runs in a well-deserved performance considering his slow start this season. At the close of play I made a point of seeking out Eli to wish him good luck for the rest of the season. He shook me warmly by the hand and said that from facing my bowling, he could tell I was my father's son. That single sentence beats any shot, any wicket, any promotion up the order, as my highlight of the season so far.

Career Stats to Date

---

A pretty unremarkable trio of games for our player avatar this episode, as we failed to match our impressive bowling performances in the season's first round. Our scoring with the bat is definitely on the up, and although we're yet to break into the 20s I don't think it'll be long before we find some form and start making some more valuable knocks in future innings. I already have enough material in the can for the next instalment of Trashes to Ashes, which will cover our next three matches and should make its appearance at some point over the coming weekend. Until then, thanks very much for reading. Take care, stay safe, and I'll see you around.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - Cricket 19 (PS4)