As always even in defeat the Århus team was well-spirited and positive, and had a nice day on Fyn.

Århus won the toss and elected to field first. The weather looked threatening the whole day, but there was no rain during both teams innings.

Nik started the bowling, but because of lack of rubber on his borrowed shoes, he could not get a proper foothold, and quickly signalled to skipper Peter for a change of bowlers. From the Pavilion end Mani bowled some overs. Mani got a wicket, and the new bowler Nikhil from the Bush end got a couple of wickets on what was selfdescribed as “s… balls”.

Mani got replaced by Calle, who except for a few crooked balls at the start bowled ten nice overs in a row for the first time in a long time. Nikhil was suffering from a beginning flu, and was replaced by Alan, and later had to retire from the last part of the first innings. Alan got four scalps on his bowling. The fielding was up to last-seasons higher standard, and Kjeld, Nik and Peter took some nice catches. We restricted a pretty good batting-side to 146 all out with nearly ten overs to spare, because of relatively good bowling (37 extras however left extras as this innings topscorer) and fielding.

With our latest batting-stats in mind, and with a good line-up of batsmen (and as always, a very strong tail), this looked to be a relatively easy task with 40 overs at hand. However a tight and neat bowling performance by Kerteminde’s young guns gave Århus a slow start (20 overs at the stand of 46 points at the expense of two wickets). On the otherwise beautiful Kerteminde ground the distance to the boundary proved very long for most of the Århus batsmen.

This put some pressure on the following batsmen for the remainder of the match, and even with Rajesh and Mani making 47 points in the last 6-7 overs, the remainding 6 points at the match’s last ball proved to be too much. A very close innings ended with a total of 140-6 for Århus as to Kerteminde’s 146-10.

I am however confident that the South teams last match in the season against Kerteminde will give a different result.