1stXI beat St Mary’s Melrose by 131 runs

Cargilfield 164-2 (J Wright 33 rtd, J Walker 30 rtd)

St Mary’s 34 all out (E Balfour 3-0-6-3)

The sun shone brightly for our first home game of the season where we welcomed St Mary’s to Cargilfield for our latest match in this busy first half of term. Fresh from a convincing win against Dollar on Saturday and then retaining the Glenalmond 6s on Sunday, we decided to make one or two changes having been told that St Mary’s had some girls in their team and were not that strong. This allowed Miranda and Isla to come in the side for their debuts, and both were excited about playing with the boys and testing their skills.

We won the toss and elected to bat and Edward and Theo opened and batted very carefully but ran well between the wickets, with Theo in particular budging the ball in to gaps to keep the scoreboard ticking over; they put on 35 for the first wicket before Theo was bowled playing down the wrong line and Edward was retired on 8 off 25 balls. Miranda came in at number 3 and hit a couple of balls to the boundary before James W and Jamie W came together and together they were quick to punish anything off line with some powerful strokeplay, putting on 45 together: both reached well made 30s before being retired, but they got the scoreboard really ticking before Archie came in to join the skipper and he crashed the ball to the boundary making a quickfire 23no as we amassed 164 in our 20 overs for the loss of just 2 wickets. An excellent batting performance and once again I was pleased with the discipline we showed, keeping our heads, not throwing our wickets away and being ruthless on anything short or off line and also running really well between the wickets.

It would take an outstanding batting effort from St Mary’s to chase our total down, and they did not get off to the best of starts when their captain was bowled first ball of the innings by Oliver, and so the die was cast. Wickets fell quickly and they soon slipped to 29 for 7, with Miranda picking up two wickets on debut, bowling very accurately, and Edward took 3 with his typical metronomic accuracy, bowling fast, with great control and at the stumps which the St Mary’s batters found very difficult to cope with. Wilfred also took two wickets, and showed lots of promise for the rest of the season. In the end, St Mary’s managed to reach 34 all out, giving us another convincing win despite making a few changes to the team.

Well played. We performed really well with bat and ball, and we played some excellent cricket as a team on what was a glorious sunny afternoon.