1st XI Game 13 - Bristol 314-4, Bridgwater 314-9 - Match tied

By rights we shouldn’t have got a full game of cricket in, let alone one with such a knife-edge finish as this. Storm clouds scudded around the ground all afternoon; the wind blustered and gusted so persistently that Louie Shaw seemed to spend as much of the time chasing his sunhat around the field as he did the ball. The seemingly inevitable rain, though, largely stayed away, except for a brief light shower during the Bristol innings, until well into the Bridgwater reply.
It was at 6.43pm that the players were finally forced to leave the field. Bridgwater were 225 for 4 off 40.3 overs in reply to Bristol’s total of 314 for 4. Two wickets in the two overs before the interruption had tilted the game back in Bristol’s favour after partnerships of 68 in 74 balls between Liam Kitch and Will Smeed, and 119 in 127 balls between Smeed and Ian Dev Chauhan had given the visitors a base from which to mount a plausible assault on the target. Chauhan holed out to Will Young on the mid-wicket boundary off Neil Pollard, and Max Waller, after scoring six off two balls, was bowled by Will Rudge to leave Bridgwater seven runs behind the DLS par score when the rain came. If there had been no further play, Bristol would have been declared winners.
Bristol had been put into bat by Bridgwater’s skipper, who presumably wasn’t anticipating conceding over 300 when he made that decision. James Bracey and Lisle Durrans again gave Bristol the perfect start, putting on 83 in a ball short of 20 overs. Bracey’s imperious straight drive off Roberts looked an early candidate for shot of the day, until Durrans matched it with one of his own off the promising Leonard in the next over.
After Durrans departed, Young came to the crease looking in threatening mood. He got off the mark with consecutive fours – a square cut and a straight drive – and then was given a life as he advanced down the pitch and Kitch failed to complete the stumping. It was the last sniff of a wicket that Bridgwater had for another twenty overs as Young and Bracey added 129 at more than a run a ball and Bracey completed his fourth league century of the season. The stock of superlatives used to describe this pair’s batting for Bristol this year, is running low, but all were equally applicable here. They were both dismissed, however, in successive overs, Young getting underneath a pull, and Bracey chopping on trying to fiddle the ball down to third man.
From a springboard of 215 for 3 in the 41st, Bristol’s total was always going to be challenging, but a remarkable partnership of 73 off 39 balls between Fin Trenouth and Kieran Noema-Barnett extended it into the realms of the almost unassailable.
Bridgwater were making a good fist of it, though, when their pursuit was interrupted by the weather, but even when play resumed just before 7.30 (with no overs lost), one sensed they would still struggle to score the additional 90 need to win off 9.3 overs. Tommy Probert replaced Rudge from the pavilion end and, in a two over spell that conceded just six runs, dismissed first Chris Skidmore (a top edge that seemed to take an age to return to earth and nestle in Bracey’s waiting gloves) and Smeed (a sliding catch on the mid-wicket boundary just in front of the scorebox by Noema-Barnett with the batsman two short of a century). Noema-Barnett then bowled Jonathan Vickery and at 255-7 in the 46th, Bristol looked to have the game won.
Even though Stuart Butt, assisted by young Ned Leonard, took nineteen from the 48th over, Rudge dismissed him off the second ball of the 49th, and four balls later Leonard was run out by a combination of Shaw and Bracey as he attempted an audacious second run. So Bridgwater needed 21 to win with just one wicket left. The final over seemed a formality.
Andrew Skidmore, though, had other ideas. A four through the covers; a scampered two to long on; a hoick for four to deep backward square; a majestic straight six. Suddenly the equation was five from two balls and the game was in the balance again. Ball five somehow ended up in the no-man’s land on the on-side and the batsmen again got home for two. The final ball went straight to the deep mid-on fielder, but both batsmen had their heads down and were running like they’d never run before and the merest hint of a fumble meant they again completed two. And thereby secured a tie.
A great game of cricket for the neutral, but while the honours, and the points, were equally shared, it was one of those ties, given what preceded it, that felt like a memorable victory for one side and a deflating defeat for the other.