I am hoping that enough time has elapsed, and the wounds, while still tender, are sufficiently healed that we can review Bristol 1st XI’s 2021 season without dredging up too much emotional distress. And while it will, of course, as part of this exercise, be necessary painfully to revisit the last few weeks in August, including that final Saturday, when Bristol missed out on their ultimate goal of promotion back to Premier One by, to coin a phrase, the barest of margins, there is much else to celebrate and many happier memories to look back on with pride.

Let’s begin at the beginning. May was book-ended by convincing victories on home turf. In the opening game Dan Jones took 3-11, and Will Rudge, Louie Shaw and Miles Kantolinna bagged two wickets apiece at very little cost, as Bath seconds were skittled for 122. Bristol’s top order knocked these off with twenty-one overs and six wickets to spare.

A Weston-super-Mare side boasting two current and one former professional fared even worse at the end of the month. Bristol rattled up 264 in their 45 overs, thanks to a fourth-wicket stand of 133 between Harry “he hits it f***ing miles” Thompson – whose 53-ball 82 included four of the largest sixes you are likely to see at Failand – and Louie Shaw, unbeaten on 76. It was Bristol’s other Shaw – Josh – who then destroyed Weston’s batting, taking 6-14 to seal a huge win by 212 runs.

Bristol’s campaign stuttered in the middle of the month as the weather gods held sway, with two complete wash-outs (Taunton St Andrews, significantly, had only one). And when Bristol did get on the field against Frome, they needed Josh Shaw again, in his only other appearance of the season, to come to their rescue, this time with the bat. He hit 52 off 33 balls, peppering the tennis-courts with four sixes and overseeing a recovery from 45-6 to 121 all out. This proved sufficient as he then took 3-23 to back-up Tommy Probert’s season’s-best 4-17, as the visitors were bowled out for 88.

As the campaign moved into June a potentially tricky encounter on Winterbourne’s notoriously capricious pitch was safely negotiated. Although it was the only occasion before mid-July that Bristol failed to bowl the opposition out, the 162 for 7 that the home side mustered in their 45 overs was easily overhauled for just the loss of Fin Trenouth. The arrival over the winter of Nic Halstead-Cleak and Miles Kantolinna had brought much-needed solidity to complement Trenouth’s blond-mulletted swagger at the top of Bristol’s order. Kantolinna’s unbeaten 51 was the highest of his several useful contributions with the bat throughout the season while Halstead-Cleak’s 60 not out was his second half-century but merely hinted at the prolific run-scoring that was to come later in the season.

Bristol hit the top of the table on June the twelfth – they remained there until the last day of the season - after a second nine-wicket win in successive weeks, this time against Ilminster. Rudge and Probert reduced the visitors to 40-5 inside 11 overs, and Joyner, Jones and Louie Shaw quickly mopped up the rest, before Trenouth kick-started the chase of 82 with a 21-ball 38, and Kantolinna and Halstead-Cleak knocked off the remainder.

A similar Trenouth onslaught the following week (this time 47 from 23) broke the back of a pursuit of 168 away to Taunton St Andrews, with Kantolinna’s 43 then seeing Bristol to within sight of the finish-line. Earlier Ashleigh Joyner had worked his magic to rip out Saints’ formidable middle order, finishing with 5 for 36, and Trenouth snaffled five catches behind the stumps.

Early finishes were become a regular feature as the midpoint of the season arrived with a supremely comfortable victory against North Perrott. Trenouth began his innings with more restraint this time but was soon into his stride and amassed a gargantuan 142 off 112 balls (15 fours and 3 sixes). After he was fifth out in the forty-second over, Archie Fellowes (32 off 22) and Jack Ellison (24 from 13) continued the assault, adding 40 more runs off the last 20 balls. This time it was Jones (4-21) and Louie Shaw (3 for 22) who engineered the visitors’ collapse from 61-2 to 100 all out. Bristol received 22 points for this faultless display. As a result of the league’s curious Covid regulation Taunton St Andrews received the same number without taking the field against Frome, due to an outbreak in their opposition’s camp.

This elevated Saints to second in the table, but by close of play on the first Saturday of July, when Bristol posted 310-3 at North Parade against the hapless Bath seconds, Bristol were 29 points clear of them. This match marked the start of Nic Halstead-Cleak’s purple patch of three unbeaten centuries and an 85 in five innings. He hit an unbeaten 111 off 117 here, but was almost outshone by Archie Fellowes’ contribution. Arriving at the midpoint of the innings, he took full advantage of being dropped off his sixth ball, and displayed a previously unseen power and range of hitting, walking off unbeaten on 94 off 75 balls with 7 fours and 4 sixes. With rain forecast though, and storm clouds gathering to the west, this was not enough to secure Bristol the points and the game entered an interesting new phase, with Louie Shaw (2 for 21 off 9) and Kantolinna (1 for 8 off 6) rattling through fifteen overs in 37 minutes to reach the 20-over threshold that constituted a match. As it turned out, the rain held off for the further 10.4 overs that Jones (3-24) and Joyner (2-8) required to complete the job.

The wickets were similarly shared around the following week against Bishopston (three for Joyner, two each for Probert, Louie Shaw and Kantolinna, and one for Jones, with Trenouth bagging three stumpings). This after the middle order batted around Halstead-Cleak to post 198. The victory margin was 67 runs as Bishopston lost five wickets for 19 in a decisive six-over period in the middle of their innings.

The hottest day of the season saw Bristol visiting Frome and running their opponents ragged in the field as they amassed 262 for 8. Harry Thompson took a liking to the short straight boundary, clearing it six times and also hitting 7 fours in his 84-ball 106, including a partnership of 80 in 8 overs towards the end with Shay Sainsbury (42 off 30). Frome seemed to call off the chase on the loss of their third wicket in the 24th over, blocking out the remaining 21 overs to end seven wickets down and 65 short. If this was a tactical decision to prioritise batting points over the win, it is ironic that they fell three runs short of their fourth point.

Nic Halstead-Cleak’s second century (104 not out off 69 balls with 14 fours and a six), and an incredible late innings salvo of 38 from just 14 balls from Jack Ellison, formed the basis of Bristol’s 204 for 4 in a rain-reduced 21-overs-per-side game against Midsomer Norton. All six regular bowlers shared the wickets as the visitors could muster only 89 for 8.
A profitable July ended with another 22-point victory, this time at Weston-super-Mare. Rudge bowled his nine overs straight through at the start and took 4 for 29, and Probert, after a tidy opening spell, returned later in the innings to dismiss Weston’s two top-scorers and finish with 3 for 25. Another flyer from Trenouth (36 off 25) and a third century from Halstead-Cleak (102 not out off 89 with 17 fours) made light of the chase; Kantolinna keeping him company until the end for the third team in the season.

August arrived,with Bristol still 25 points clear at the top of the table and all appearing rosy. But the month began with another unhelpful washout, this time against Winterbourne, on a day when Taunton St Andrews managed to get on the field for long enough to secure a win against Ilminster, narrowing that gap to 14 points.

Ah, Ilminster! The moment can be put off no longer: we need to talk about Ilminster.

The stark facts of the case are these: on Saturday 14 August Ilminster won the toss and put Bristol in to bat on an inscrutable pitch with a tempting short boundary on one side. Bristol lost wickets at regular intervals, many of the top eight discovering demons in the pitch and none of them exceeding the 21 scored by Louie Shaw, who had looked quite comfortable in comparison to his team-mates before shooting for that short boundary and not quite making it. At 101 for 7 in the 31st over, Will Rudge walked to the wicket and proceeded to hit 9 sixes and 5 fours in an incredible 40-ball 84 not out to give Bristol’s total some respectability. Along the way he shared in a remarkable partnership of 74 with Tommy Probert, of which Probert’s contribution was a numerically small but vitally important four.
Rudge and Probert each took a wicket in their opening spell, but Sam Spurway, Jonny Warry and Charlie Vickery rebuilt for the home side and Bristol’s bowlers seemed short of answers as the pitch’s demons were less in evidence. Rudge’s three over spell of off-spin in the middle of the innings was another curious feature of a bizarre match. Ilminster were cruising at 164 for 3 in the 32nd with the asking rate barely above three an over, but then Probert returned and bowled Warry with the third ball of his second spell. Four overs later, in his final over he took another, and Louie Shaw also had success off the penultimate ball of his spell in the next to give Bristol a sniff of a chance.

But with those two, and Rudge, bowled out, and Ash Joyner pulling up midway through an over unable to continue bowling, it was left to Sam Brewer and Miles Kantolinna to share the last four overs with just 12 needed. They managed to maintain the pressure, and Ilminster were still two away when the number 9 faced up to the penultimate ball. He somehow managed to manoeuvre it to the boundary, though, and Bristol suffered their first and only defeat of the season.

To add insult to injury, Taunton St Andrews recorded a 21-point win over struggling North Perrott to put them level on points with Bristol and a winner-takes-all showdown at Failand set for the following Saturday.

The following Saturday, though was a wet one, and the winner-takes-all showdown never quite came to pass. The players did get on the field, for a 30-overs-a-side game starting at 3 o’clock, and Bristol will have been well pleased to limit the visitors to 156 and to pick up maximum bowling points in a reduced overs match. Jones and Probert were the pick of the bowlers with 3 wickets each, the latter taking the key wicket of James Regan in the second over of the innings.

Trenouth again provided impetus at the start of the innings, but he and Kantolinna were both caught behind in quick succession, and then it started to rain. Louie Shaw and Halstead-Cleak steadied the ship and were level with the DLS par at the end of the fifteenth over, but Halstead-Cleak fell in the next and they were suddenly eight behind on DLS. Shaw managed to score fifteen off the next, though, to nudge in front again, with the rain getting heavier and the crucial twenty-over mark approaching. Bristol began the twentieth over needing six to better the DLS par score. Harry Thompson took two fours and a single off the first three balls, but then the umpires decided they had got wet enough and, to the players’ bemusement and consternation, called a halt to proceedings just three balls short of a game. With the bonus points from the abandoned game counting, Bristol went into the final round of games with a slender two-point lead, and a greater number of victories than Taunton, which would give them the title if the final points scores were level.

So the task for Bristol at North Perrott the following week was simple: win the game and score as many bonus points in the process as possible.

The day that would end in tragedy for Bristol began with farce as it was realised, just before play was due to start, that the stumps at each end were not correctly aligned, leading to a 40-minute delay while one set was repositioned. This was not the only curiosity of the game. While the result was never really in much doubt – Bristol won, in the end, by 108 runs – the imperative to secure bonus points resulted in a tense last-ball finish not just at the end of the game, but at the end of each innings.

Bristol’s top order seemed to still be suffering from a touch of the Ilminsters, subsiding, despite a few promising starts, to 101 for 6 in the twenty-sixth over. This brought together Ellison and Rudge who batted without alarms for a run-a-ball partnership that fell just three short of a century, and took the team to within two of a fourth batting point. The replacement of Rudge with Probert at this point proved opportune when it came to the running between the wickets, and he and Ellison added 24 in the next 16 balls (including 6 twos, only one fewer than Rudge and Ellison had collected in the previous 16 overs). Ellison was crestfallen to be given out LBW, for a superb 56, with the total still three short of maximum batting points, and when Joyner was bowled three balls later, one run was still needed. Dan Jones walked out to face the final ball of the innings - only the second ball he had faced all season. For the unprecedented number of Bristol away supporters looking on it was as stressful as the last ball of a close chase. Somehow the batsmen managed to scamper a single and the first part of Bristol’s assignment was completed – just.

The game as a contest didn’t survive much beyond Rudge’s opening spell of 3 for 11 off 7 overs. With a run-out and a wicket each for Shaw and Jones in the next four overs, the hosts found themselves 35 for 6 at the end of the 17th, and thereafter their gameplan seemed to be all about denying Bristol wickets and thus bowling points. Bristol remained patient, and it was just as well, since it was another fourteen overs before they secured the seventh wicket, and it took another ten after that, and the return of Rudge, bowling like a man possessed, to take the eighth. The number ten batsman Frost’s tactic of ramping every ball brought him one boundary but never looked like an effective approach against Rudge, and he was duly cleaned up, to give the Bristol skipper his fifth wicket.

This left Bristol fifteen balls to bowl at the last pair, needing to take the final wicket to secure maximum bowling points. Rudge, in the three balls he bowled to the number 11, Pattemore, and Probert in six balls in the next over, passed the edge and almost penetrated the defences, but to no avail. For the final over, it was the number 7, and captain, Rowswell, who was on strike, having survived 72 balls for his 30. He faced Jones, who like his two fast-bowling team-mates, came close but couldn’t make the breakthrough as the number of balls remaining counted ominously down. And so it came down to the final ball, and finally one took the edge… and dropped just in front the diving Rudge at first slip. By such small margins are the fates of teams decided.

By now the news had come through that Taunton St Andrews had chased down 232 for the loss of six wickets against Frome (losing their sixth wicket, in fact, on 146), giving them 22 points. Without that elusive final North Perrot wicket, Bristol took just 19. They were one point short of promotion.

It was the bitterest of pills for Bristol’s players and supporters to swallow. It was hard not to trawl the season for sliding-doors moments where an extra few runs here, a wicket not lost there, an extra wicket taken somewhere else, might have bolstered the bonus points tally. It was difficult, too, not to query how it can be that a team who won thirteen and lost only one game could finish below a team who won one fewer and lost three more. And for those who took part or were present at North Perrot, it was almost impossible not to imagine each of those last fifteen balls as a possibility of a different outcome.

But let us not succumb to such morbid meditations, and instead congratulate the fourteen players who represented Bristol’s 1st XI (four of whom played every game) on how they performed and what they achieved in 2021. Every one of those fourteen made important contributions throughout the season. Nic Halstead-Cleak, of course, was leading run-scorer and topped the batting averages by a country mile, but nine players scored fifties and averaged more than 24. And Dan Jones, despite missing three games for his nuptials, and bowling mainly with an older ball, finished as leading wicket-taker on 28, but three others had 22 or more, and five bowlers had at least one four-wicket haul.

The fielding and running between the wickets were a class above almost all the opposition, and gave Bristol a head-start in every game. Some of the most abiding memories of the season will be of Jack Ellison hoovering up everything in the covers; Louie Shaw a strange hybrid of a leaping salmon and a terrier at backward point; Archie Fellowes ever-reliable in the slips; Miles Kantolinna taking some nerve-tingling skyers on the square boundary; and Nic Halstead-Cleak fielding in all sorts of different positions but seeming to attract more than his fair share of catches and taking pretty much all of them.

Bristol was the best team in the division by most measures. They were unlucky with the weather and with the Covid regulations. Few people (except perhaps a small number in Somerset’s county town) would deny they deserved to be promoted. But if there is one lesson that this season serves to illustrate it is that cricket, like life, is not always fair, and that you do not always get what you deserve.

Let’s go again in 2022.

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