Game Six: 1st XI vs Bath 1st XI, Home

Match Report as always provided by our very own Keith...

Bristol 1st XI v Bath 1st XI, WEPL Premier 1, 10 June 2017
Bristol 188 (49 overs), A Hunt 43, P Redwood 30, A Kelly 4-11
Bath 190-6 (39.1 overs), T Hankins 64, P Muchall 41*, H Hankins 36, W Rudge 4-39
Bath won by 6 wickets

If one Hankins doesn’t get you, the others will. Bristol were jubilant when George Hankins launched his second ball into the stratosphere and Alan Hunt positioned himself perfectly to take the catch at deepish mid-off when it finally returned to earth. It left Bath 6-2 and gave Will Rudge his first wicket on his return to bowling after injury. Making up for lost time in the season, Rudge quickly added three more wickets: Tim Rouse nonchalantly pouched at slip by Archie Fellowes, Greg Hay one of five LBW victims in the match, and Sam Mount bowled offering no shot. Bath were in trouble at 49-5 in the 13th over chasing Bristol’s modest but defendable 188.

Just prior to Mount’s dismissal, Tom Hankins had danced down the pitch to Tommy Probert and lofted him over mid-off for four, prompting James Bracey to don the helmet and stand-up to the stumps, a tactic he also later used to Rudge’s bowling. This shackled Hankins, and his new partner Gordon Muchall, to some extent, and Bath might have been reduced to 71-6 had Fellowes managed to cling on to a chance from Hankins, diving forward at short extra cover in Richard Morrison’s first over. It was to prove a costly miss, as Bristol’s back-up bowlers could not pose the same threat that Rudge and Probert had done and Hankins, with belligerence, and Muchall, with circumspection, set about rebuilding the innings.

Bristol were unable to part them until they had put on 92, when Vir Lakhani trapped Tom Hankins LBW. By this time, he had made 64 at more than a run a ball, with 3 sixes and 6 fours. With 48 runs still required and four wickets left, his departure gave Bristol a sniff of a chance. (There were plenty of overs left and, though there was rain around, Bath were comfortably ahead on Duckworth Lewis Stern, so bowling Bath out was Bristol’s only realistic route to victory.) It was to prove their last success, though, as George’s younger brother Harry Hankins replaced his uncle Tom at the crease and with some clean hitting propelled his side to a rapid victory with a 29-ball 36, containing eight boundaries out of an unbroken seventh wicket partnership of 49 with Muchall.

Earlier, Bristol had experienced their own early alarms, subsiding to 17-3 with Bracey, Fin Trenouth and Fellowes back in the pavilion. It fell to the experience of Alan Hunt and Paul Redwood, both filling in for absent first team regulars, to dig Bristol out of the hole with a partnership of 85 in 19 overs. Redwood was dropped, on 2, by the ‘keeper George Hankins diving in front of first slip, but he accumulated runs with wristy flicks, glides, dabs and judicious tipping and running. Hunt was more forceful, striking seven boundaries in his 43, including two fours lofted over extra cover in an over from the spinner Simon Marchant. His dismissal heralded another mini-collapse, from 102-3 to 122-6 as Rudge, bowled around his legs sweeping, and Redwood, needlessly run out in a calamitous misunderstanding with Ralph Hardwick, departed shortly afterwards. Hardwick and Lakhani took the score to 158 in the 41st over, but both were out on the same score: Lakhani seemingly paralysed and unable to get his bat down to avoid being stumped despite Hankins’ less than lightning-fast glovework. Morrison was left stranded on 20 not out as Kelly and Muchall returned to mop up the tail, and Bristol were left well short of a fourth batting point.

Bristol slide down to sixth in the table, but their next three games are all against sides below them and they will need to get back to winning ways if they are to stay in the title race.