West Essex won the toss and elected to bat mainly due to the fact that they only had 4 players at the ground at 11.45....We had the best possible start when Naveed took a blinder of a one handed catch off Olly 5th ball of the first over. That meant the padded up umpire had to hastily get his gloves and bat and take strike !
WE had a couple of decent partnerships that helped their score along. But we stuck to our task and with some great catching (Faz with 3) and generally decent ground fielding we polished off the WE innings in the 48th over. Special mention to Ahsan who mixed it up well and took the middle out of WE batting to give us a really chasable total.

Something we HAVE to work on is our over rate. We were still bowling while the 1s on the other pitch had bowled their 50, had tea and were back out batting before we finished. Come on lads that's appalling, we have to do better !

We were cautious at the start of our reply against a decent left armer who had really good control and variation. Arshad succumbed to a well placed out swinger, Atif went for one and didn't quite catch it right spooning up to mid off.
Naveed and Waqar set about rebuilding. As they accelerated WE heads went down and the chase became a walk. Naveed was ruthless on anything remotely loose, there was quite a lot of that, including one HUGE 6 into the allotments he single handedly broke the WE resistance. He brought up a quite sensational 100 off just 93 balls with 12 4s and that 6. Waqar was the perfect foil, giving the strike to the man in form and helping himself when the opportunity presented itself. Waqar fell in sight of the winning line. Their partnership was well in excess of 150. Naveed finished unbeaten on 111 as we won with 10 overs to spare.
A great win against a usually dogged opponent, but the were put properly in their place on Saturday.

Baulcs