Match Report Ramsbottom 1st XI v Burnley 1st XI – 20th May 2023
RCC 203 for 6 (50 overs) BCC 206 for 4 (47.1 overs)
Scorecard here and livestream here
Some positives but nothing to show for it
On a beautiful day for cricket and Acre Bottom looking resplendent the Rams won the toss and elected to bat.
Facing an excellent opening attack from high flying Burnley we were soon one wicket down and some of us feared the worst.
However this was the day that skipper Tom Parton and Ben Pearson showed us their class. Both faced a difficult period against some agressive, tight bowling from Snowden and Bailey but manged to weather the new ball storm and then proceeded to display some fine strokeplay.
A change of bowling saw the introduction of the experienced Bharat Tripathi and the Burnley pro Erasmus into the attack but this did not halt the momentum of our pair and they took the score to 105 before Ben was caught in the deep for a fine 42, an innings that should boost his confidence for future matches.
Our prop Sen then joined Tom at the wicket. Playing his last game before returning to South Africa for their A Team tour of Sri Lanka Sen adopted an aggressive approach, particularly to the spinners and the pair took the score to 183 before Tom fell to a boundary catch for an excellent 85.
With overs running out wickets were lost in pursuit of posting a decent target and we ended up with a score of 203, a fair effort, but possibly 40 short of what most of us saw as a challenging target. Great credit must go to Burnley’s opening bowlers who were very impressive.
The only chance we had against an extremely strong Burnley batting line up was to get early wickets, particularly that of Erasmus. In fairness we made a decent start thanks to a stunning catch by Pykey to get rid of Bedford and Birdy inducing a false stroke from Roberts.
This brought Erasmus to the crease and along with Dan Pickup scoring was not proving easy thanks to some tight bowling from the reliable Birdy and Pykey. In fact the next wicket fell in the 25th over when Birdy trapped Pickup lbw. At this stage the score was only on 65 and a few of us thought it was game on. Sadly this was the Bird’s last over and unfortunately our spin bowlers had an off day and took some punishment from Erasmus and Shah, who took the game away from us adding 115 in no time before Shah was bowled by Pykey for 58 off only 44 balls with the score on 180. Burnley were then able to cruise to victory in the 48th over to put them in 2nd spot in the league and leave us grounded at the bottom.
Despite this not too unexpected defeat one could draw positives in the batting performances of Tom and Ben and the bowling of Birdy and Pykey.
This was another superb wicket produced by our ground staff and with another 30 or 40 runs on our total we could have caused an upset.
We now face the possibilty of having to be without Sen for the rest of the season and having to rely on sub pros. It is going to be tough as this is an ultra competitive league, as seen by the way our four representatives went through in the Lancashire Knock Out, two of them beating top rated sides from the Northern League and Liverpool Competition.
We are going to have to up our game and stick together and hopefully we will get some results falling our way.
Man of the Match – Tom Parton
