On a baking hot day, the main event wasn’t cricket but a certain football match being played over in Germany. With possibly our youngest side of the season being fielded, and Matt Dudley taking over as skipper due to Edger’s absence the plan was to, hopefully, bowl first and skittle Penkridge for something low and knock ‘em off in time for the footy. Unfortunately, although a faultless plan on paper, it didn’t quite happen.

It started off well, we won the toss and elected to field in the baking hot sun. Lee ‘Jim’ Bowen and WSW opened the bowling with some tight lines restricting Penkridge to less than two an over for the first ten on an extremely unpredictable track. Duddles was next on, replacing ‘Jim’ whilst Windows continued to keep it tight from the one end as he bowled his way through a 15 over spell. Matt also bowled some great stuff as he finished with figures of 11-7-11-0, whilst Windows ended up with 15-2-36-1.

Some slow-paced batting from Penkridge was encouraging Wombourne as they stepped up the pressure in the field. 3 run-outs occurred during the innings, including one with ‘Jim’ racing the batsman back to the crease with ball in hand and just pipping him to the post- great thinking from the young ‘un!

As Wombourne pushed on, the run’s had all but dried up so Duddles gave Jordan Russell, Cain Kirby and Joe ‘Pembers’ Pemberton a chance to shine with the ball. All 3 bowled really well, both Pembers & Jordan finding some great turn with Jordan ending up with 2 wickets and Pembers a well deserved 1. Cain bowled some good no nonsense seam, and unexpectedly even got one to bounce over the bemused batsmen’s head-surely a first for the E & S!?

Anyway, off to tea and what a great one it is. Many thanks go out to Tracy and Joe for a cracking spread. At this point news from Germany had finally reached us, a 1-0 win although a somewhat lacklustre performance was the story being told by everyone.

So off to bat with Diddy and Jack opening up, although the partnership didn’t last long as Jack took a nasty blow in the nether-regions, forcing him to retire hurt. Diddy carried on regardless with some good patient batting, although his new partner, Matt Braiden, didn’t last long as he was gone first ball. In came skipper for the day Duddles as he and Diddy looked to push on. As the next wicket fell, Jack came back in with the score on around 60-2 and the game surely in our favour? At least that’s what we thought.

An all too familiar collapse was just around the corner as we blew our chance to really capitalise. From 60-2 to 84 all out was what happened this time as we failed to apply ourselves properly on what was admittedly an awful batting track.

So another game, another collapse. Unfortunately it’s happening all too often this season, hopefully we will fare a bit better next week when we come up against Wednesbury.