A winning draw for Chenies 2nd XI vs Barnes Wild Geese

With Nick Holden away for a wedding, Brian Shipley took the reigns for Chenies' first home game of the season against Barnes Wild Geese.
We opened the batting with a re-jigged line up due to early season availability problems but this did not matter with Athar showing impressive early season form despite the lack of a net session all winter! He managed 58 with others chipping in along the way including a 33 from Muneeb Fayaz and a rallying 18 from Martin Crossley towards the end. 70 odd extras also helped us along nicely and allowed us to declare 2 overs early with the score at 229 for 8.
Brian decided that spin was the way forward from the off with himself and Dave Brown keeping things extremely tight bowling 29 overs between them. Brian picked up an impressive 5-47 and Dave bagged himself two wickets on his first bowling performance since injuring his shoulder over a year ago. Not quite the bowling action of old but still proving extremely effective! Martin then came on and produced an impressive spell picking up two wickets whilst typically keeping scoring to a minimum. Unfortunately the final wicket eluded us and we perhaps missed that extra bowler with Zia unavailable and Ateeq on 1st team duty.
Another solid showing from us particularly from Athar with the bat and Brian with his 5 wickets and on another day we could have walked away with another 25 points. It's clear that Barnes were never really in a position to win the game and the points reflected that with Chenies coming away with 15; leaving us in 2nd position in the table after week 2.

We move on to an early season, top of the table clash this coming Saturday away to Tring Park 3's.