Buxton Bonanza

Nomads visited the beautiful Buxton Parks ground. The selection pool was limited but produced a stong team including local boy Dan Moss.
Nomads batted with Rana Ghosal and Pete Gardner. Ghosal was out fairly conventionally glancing the ball to the keeper. Gardner was also caught behind but to a splendid reaction catch by the slip. The Buxton bowlers were bowling well and Matt Barker and Aneek Mahmood could not take too many risks and indeed Mahmood was quite lucky to survive some miscues. However the 2 opening bowlers were seen off but the score was only 54 off the first 16 overs. On a large soft ground, Nomads were looking for a 160+ score to be competitive. However this was not reckoning with the innings of Mahmood. He started to let fly as he has been doing in recent weeks. He lost Rich Bastable and Jas Basi as partners fairly quickly but when Jim Cogzell joined him at 121, things really took off and a total of 4 sixes on a really big ground saw the last 10 overs going at over 10 per over. On the way Mahmood celebrated his 99 for the Nomads and then realised he had not reached his 100 but he did this next ball with a 4. Cogzell was also rattling along and just ran out of time before he could reach his 50.
The total of 240 was a lot more than looked possible after the early overs, but in the 3 previous matches where we had also scored over 200, we had only won one.
It was a good contest between our openers Aneek Mahmood and Dan Lee, and the opening batsmen Slater and Dye. Slater, especially, looked good and was a little unlucky to be bowled by a ball which kept low. Mahmood and Lee had done their job of removing the 2 openers and the rest of the Buxton team were not as strong and certainly not of the same standard of the Buxton team of last season. Jim Cogzell and Dan Moss polished off the middle order which allowed Rana Ghosal and Jas Basi some bowling practice . Ghosal took advantage of this by bowling the equivalent of 4 overs within his allotted 2 overs. Basi was much steadier and claimed a wicket. John Hoddy took over from Moss and claimed the last wicket when Dave Rolfe pouched a towering top edge.
This result owed so much to the relative new boys Aneek Mahmood and Jim Cogzell who have both come on so much since they joined the club, both players scoring a pb for the club. Cogzell was unlucky that on any other day he would easily have claimed the MVP. Another unusual feature was Dan Moss not wishing to bat due to his connection with Buxton, but he had to bowl and was very effective off his short run. Also regular bowler John Hoddy only got on late due to the way the match panned out.

[Disclaimer: Any offence caused by this article is unintentional, any praise is well deserved]

Date: 1st August 2021
Start time: 14:00am
Venue: Buxton
Competition: 40 overs Friendly
Scores: Lichfield Nomads 240 for 5, Buxton 114 all out
Result: Lichfield Nomads beat Buxton by 126 runs
Toss: Buxton won the toss and elected to field.
Scorers: J. Hoddy
Umpires: Various
Report: J. Hoddy
Weather: Cloudy

Last update: 3 August 2021