West Herts won the toss, but with one of their players stuck in traffic they had no option but to bat first.

A slightly delayed start and a new pairing of Jack and Magnus to open our bowling attack. Magnus getting our first breakthrough in the second over, quickly followed with a wicket for Jack 5 balls later. Very tidy bowling

West Herts composed themselves after the early wickets and we struggled to lay a glove on them again until the 12th over - with Leo sending a quick ball down and clean bowling!

Some huge hitting from West Herts (I’ve not seen a six this season and West Herts hit 3 of them). Plenty of balls up in the air presented a series of good catch opportunities. A combination of being a bit slow to move the field, calling for catches where another player was in a better position, and stepping out of the catch last minutes as the ball came down with snow on - meaning we weren’t quite able to capitalise. The team will have learned a lot about fielding from this fixture!

The scoreboard was pushing past 300 with 5 overs remaining! We were in desperate need of some wickets in order to keep the target down. Ellis and Benji taking the responsibility of bowling some extra overs - and three quick wickets between them pinned West Herts back at the end, leaving a target of 325!

At the crease, the boys did incredibly well to get the bat down to the ball against some very good bowling. Northchurch were working really hard to try and play some shots against some really really good bowling (if unnecessarily long run ups!) - and rewards came in the form of neat singles well- run.

Every so often a ball did sit up asking to be hit - and across the team we played some lovely shots with nice boundaries for Jack, Benji, Callan, Harry and Leo to keep our run rate ticking along. Oscar however really rose to the occasion showing confident shot play with a strike rate of 133 and our only player to get over the boundary multiple times.

Northchurch coming in on 254. A very respectable score especially as we lost 8 wickets along the way (each taking 5 runs off!).

The boys were gracious in defeat and recognised their good performance against simply a better team. We put Player of the Match to the vote (something we’re trying out this year), and Oscar was unanimously elected POTM by the team. Skill of the week remains the choice of the Manager&Coaching team - with Benji taking the honours this week for brilliant bowling and nice shot play. Great to watch him last night!

Well done all - a good game and a bit of learning, and importantly all done with smiles on faces and good grace.