Match Reports



Match Reports

22nd June 2017
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V&A v The Bandits

It had been a day of blistering weather and it was a sensible decision to play a forty over game.
10th June 2017
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V&A v The Chelsea Arts Club

Our second oldest fixture after the mighty Hermits, and always fun. This year, when they turned up, eventually, I counted the number of their yoof element, young people who run and bend and throw. None. In contrast we had 7 – 8 if you count Christiaan (I don’t).
3rd June 2017
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V&A v Townies and Country XI

A beautiful day and an enthralling match with the most gentlemanly opponents, a magnificent lunch and tea masterminded by Estelle de Caires, concluded in the penultimate over...but not everything went according to plan.
28th May 2017
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V&A v The Hermits

THE HEMMINGFORD HERMITS were founded a year after us by a ragged lot who had mostly been to Exeter University or Radley
20th May 2017
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V&A v The Invalids

The INVALIDS were founded by two officers in WWI, recovering from wounds in hospital. They resolved, if they survived the war, to start a cricket team. They did, and it too survives, thanks in part to Richard Durdon-Smith, the eminent actor and all-rounder.  He has just remarried. She is both younger and lovely (which is good) and his agent (which is not). You shouldn’t marry your agent or publisher or venereologist, it is too close to home. He was away ‘working’ as actors say. It is a rotten shame that the V&A’s actor, Lachlan Nieboer, who has starred on stage and screen and Downton Abbey, is wasted at the moment. Last week he was tutoring an aristocratic boy at a schloss in Denmark. They must have been overjoyed when they saw Lachlan step off the sleigh, expecting (obviously) a conventional tutor, a retired paedo prep school master with leather elbow […]
17th May 2017
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V&A v Rob Taylor’s XI

It was a game of ebbs and flows; a game in which each side took turns to appear down and out only to then have it, apparently, in the bag. Rob Taylor had purloined a number of the younger players from the V&A to supplement his cricketing chums.  This meant they could do things like run and throw, unlike most of the V&A players, who consider it infra dig to bend down to pick a ball up.  Nicky Bird had a dicky tummy and was confined to his bed, which meant we were ten.  It was clear that he was not firing on all cylinders, because he had entrusted instructions on using the immersion heater to Adam Jacot.  Adam is a man of many and diverse talents, but his knowledge contains vast plains of staggering ignorance and the prospect of being left in charge of such a vital function had […]
6th May 2017
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V&A v The All Sorts

Adam Jacot, who captained, said we were a difficult team to motivate. He might have been right, but the weather was grey and remained so thoughout the day until obligingly brightening up whilst we sat in the garden of The Golden Ball.
2nd May 2017
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V&A v The Bushmen

“They are a small, hardy, intelligent and gentle people, who have eked out life for themselves, while the rest of humanity developed along completely different lives” – John Simpson Our opponents were not the people of the Kalahari desert as Simpson describes but, spiritually at least, from Bush House, the home to the BBC World Service until its move in 2012.  Theirs is a distinguished, if eccentric history: their first match, organised in 1942 by Hugh Carlton Greene, brother of Graham Greene and later the Director-General of the BBC, was against the Political Warfare Executive at Woburn Abbey.  It was said that match was interrupted by news that Tobruk had fallen, but that the BBC cricketers, not unlike Drake at Plymouth Hoe, played on regardless.  This has since been shown, like much of the V&A’s match reports, to be pure fiction. Bushmen alumni include the poet Edmund Blunden, former Foreign […]
23rd April 2017
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V&A v The GTs

It was nice to be back. The pavilion boasted new floorboards on the porch but otherwise all was the same; same rabbit holes in the outfield, same kites in the sky, same track with its variable bounce. Not as good as Turville said Christiaan, our skip, but he is a curmudgeon so take no notice. He got walloped for three successive boundaries which always puts him in a bad mood. He suggested that the offending batsman ‘might try playing a cricket stroke’ implying that the fellow was a bit agricultural.  Christiaan may be John Inman in his second-hand bookshop but is John Wayne on the pitch. We batted first, opening with Ashcroft and Nick P-G. Ross whacked a four off his first ball and looked set for 50 when he was plumb LBW (for 10), knew it and walked as the finger went up. Enter Chris Mounsey-Thear who immediately set about the bowling […]