A WIN!
This weekend was packed with sports for me (and house cleaning as we prepare for another visitor). On Saturday, I watched England beat Israel in soccer in an important qualifying match for the Euro2008 tournament, England beat the U.S. in the World Cup of rugby--no shame there as England is the defending champion and the U.S. national rugby team is a parttime team! Finally, I watched the Michigan Wolverines get humiliated once again at home--a channel here shows lots of college football. I was too tired to watch the Tigers play baseball at midnight. On Sunday, we experimented with watching the NFL over the internet. There were some glitches but I watched the Packers kick a field goal to win at the end of the game and I saw all of the Lions nerve-racking victory over the Raiders.
But before that on Sunday, I played in my 2nd cricket match. We played a team from a small village about 10 miles from Cambridge and traveled to a cricket field in the town just outside their village. We pitched (bowled) first and quickly got 3 men out, but the they hung around and extended the game. I got to pitch two overs (innings) and did much better than last time--I think I only gave up 2 or 3 runs in my 12 pitches (bowls), which isn't bad for cricket. We finally brought back our good bowlers and closed out their inning with them having 136 runs.
As we prepared to bat, I was placed 5th in the order--probably because Andrew knew I didn't bat last time under embarrassing circumstance. We started quickly scoring runs and they had no really fast bowlers (pitchers) so it quickly became clear we would surpass their run total. I came up to bat with our team having about 122 runs. And I did decently! I survived about 14 pitches before hitting a soft pop-up that they caught in the air, getting me out. I batted a few single runs and even looped a line drive over the infield that ran all the way to the boundary of the field before a player could reach it. That scores 4 runs for your team. The only way to score more in an at bat is to hit the ball out of the field on the fly--like a home run--and that scores 6. So I ended up scoring 5 runs before they got me out. We not much later scored our 137th run, with 5 wickets (outs) to spare (see scorebaord above)--it took us about half as many overs to reach 136 as they did--we took 22 overs to their 44 (an over = 6 pitches, so we took around 130 pitches to score our 137 runs, while they took over 260 to score theirs. All in all, a much better cricket experience than my first match!--jt
The cricket field with a nice castle in the backround
