ANZACs vs CLCC
   On Sunday, May 19, the ANZACs took their first trip down I-85 this year to visit the fifth placed Charlotte Lions. With the ANZACs holding onto third place in the league standings we knew this wasn't going to be a easy game, but we were confident that our abundance of talent would see us through.

The game was to be played without our captain, the one and only Damien Cummins. Apparently, he couldn't make the road trip because he had to stay at home and show his arse to a potential buyer (or at least that's what it sounded like on the answering machine). But we went in to the game with unfettered optimism

Unfortunately, that optimism wasn't to pan out, for the game was over before it even started. Simon, in his apparent ignorance of celestial movements, called heads when it was clearly a day to call tails. Didn't he know that on days when Jupiter was lined up with Neptuneand the high tide occurred before that tails was clearly the better option? Charlotte, having wonthe toss, sent us in to bat and the route was on.

Sadly the toss had a far greater impact on the game than one would like. The Charlottefield is not the most fun to play on. The pitch is a Flix pitch laid on top of mud. What results is a ball which seldom makes it above the batsman's knees. Harman played back to a ball which on any normal pitch would come through around waist height. Instead, the ball came through six inches off the ground and he was walking back to the pavilion with his off stump out the ground in the first over. The rest of the innings followed in similar fashion. The gory details aren't the prettiest,so I'll skip them. Only Ketan (25 not out) and Jonathan (13) stuck around for any length of time to make it to double figures. In the end we were sitting back in the stands before with 79 runs to defend.

The bowling wasn't any better. Though this ground is notoriously difficult to build big totals when batting first, but because of the very short boundaries it also has a remarkable ability to give up runs very quickly when the bowling isn't very controlled and the runs are being chased. Charlottetook to the wayward bowling with relish and quickly showed their home ground advantage. After 15 runs in the second over we knew it wasn't going to be very long before we were back on the road home, and so it proved as we lost by 8 wickets with fifteen overs to spare.

All in all a most disappointing performance, made all the more so by the fact that for the first time in the history of the ANZACs we could have learned something from the English batting at Lords!

The ANZACs now move to the middle of the MACC table and will have to fight hard to regain our premier position in the league. The next game isn't for a few weeks, but we will have practice each of the next Tuesday evenings. 
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