It was a real case of grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory against CSSC Emplex at Barratts.  The opposition batting first made a much better effort than in our two previous encounters which had resulted in comfortable Keelby victories. Their final total was 117 for 6. We used  8 bowlers in all, none of whom performed less than reasonably, with the pick of the bunch being Mike Phillips with 2 for 15 off 4 overs and John Indian also with 2 for 15 off 2 overs. Also worthy of mention was the direct hit run out by young Aaron Oxley. We probably bowled too short too often on an easy paced artificial strip and compounded this by dropped catches and missed run out opportunities.

Nevertheless, the score looked quite attainable and even more so as we kept up with the asking throughout thanks to good knocks from Paul Parker (37),  Alan Travis (27) and Ashley Briggs (16). So this left us with just 2 runs required for a tie and 3 for a win going into the last over.  How we managed to only get a single and that from a bye when we still had 6 wickets left is still beyond me. It meant that we lost to a team, who hadn’t won previously this season, by one run and left everyone with the sick feeling that we had let ourselves down badly.