Stoke Newington 306
Southgate 289
16 over pairs match, scoring starts at 200
Southgate’s Women’s team continued their preseason preparations with a friendly match against Stoke Newington. Stokey have a more established women’s section that mainly plays hardball cricket and so only brought 6 of their less experienced players. With 10 Southgate players available, Soph Meyer and Piumi Bandara were leant to the visitors for the day so that we could play an 8-a-side match.
An arranged toss saw Stoke Newington bat first (as one of their team arrived after the start time) and Southgate’s players bowled well, often without reward. Stoke Newington’s batters showed experience in dropping the ball into gaps and running well, accumulating runs even when our bowlers made hitting boundaries difficult. Each Southgate player bowled 2 overs and Devki Shah’s were particularly tight, going for only 3 runs. Geetika Rajapakse, standing in as captain in Emma Dangerfield’s absence, eventually picked up Southgate’s first wicket in the penultimate over of the innings, clean bowling one of Stokey’s final pair.
Southgate’s batting is improving all of the time as evidenced by every player hitting at least one 4 during their innings! We’re still getting used to how high the softballs bounce on grass pitches and this caused shots to be popped up for easy catches on a couple of occasions. Alanka Goonawardena played well at the start of the innings, scoring 15 runs from 13 balls without being dismissed. Big hitting from final pair Geethika Rajapakse and Yolanda Mackie saw 44 runs added and at one stage they had Stokey nervously scrambling.
However, a late wicket meant Southgate eventually finished 17 runs short of the total set by Stoke Newington, but we can take heart from the fact that we actually scored more runs than the opposition – 119 to Stokey’s 111 – we just also lost more wickets!
The Walker ground was again a marvelous place to be on Sunday afternoon and Stoke Newington were a very friendly outfit who we look forward to playing again in the near future.
Max Joseph