Halfterm Report: Or "20 Fun Facts About the First Half of the 2023 Season"

So the first half of the 2023 season is in the books, a season that thus far has featured as many league wins as potential season-ending injuries.

And the only thing that can be said about this halfterm report is that we could do better.

Anyway, here are 20 Fun Facts about the season so far.

1) Pride of place goes to the fact we've set a new club record for lowest ever total, 40 against Old Warden.

2) Discounting concessions (for the record we've conceded two and been awarded the points in another) we've played 10 league games and won one.

3) We've won one game out of seven batting first and lost all three batting second.

4) In half of our league games we have failed to score 100.

5) In every single one of our league games we have lost 10 wickets, our best performance coming when Wayne Cutts was run out off the last ball at Sandridge.

6) Ben Wiles is the only player to have scored over 200 runs so far.

7) Mark Tattersall and Josh Scott are the only other players to have scored more than 100.

8) Tattersall has scored the second-most runs; unfortunately he's also conceded the second-most runs and is currently 40 in the red.

9) Jamie Cummins and James Barker are the only bowlers with more than 10 wickets (12 each).

10) 20 different bowlers have taken at least one wicket.

11) So far this year we have used 39 different players.

12) Of those 39, 22 have recorded at least one duck.

13) In the scorebook at Wotton-on-Stone, Darren Lunney appeared as Bunny.

14) Wayne Cutts has given as many Offley batsmen out in one umpiring stint as he has scored runs (3 including 2 leg byes) in 4 innings.

15) Matty Taylor can't tell the difference between Boaty's bat and Boaty's arse.

16) Roger Piepenstock has an off games note for the rest of the year.

17) Richie Barker has now missed matches with three different ailments.

18) Peter Gilkes has more ducks (6) than the nine lowest-scoring batsmen have produced runs between them (5).

19) Despite everything we fielded a full team on three consecutive days from the 24th-26th June - 21 different players were able to experience the thrill of defeat.

20) After Monday's narrow cup defeat we are now concentrating on the leagues; we are currently 85 points adrift of safety in the Saracens League (how is that even possible?) and 35 points above the drop zone (how the fuck is that even possible????????) in the Bedfordshire League ahead of a trip to Kempston on Sunday who are actually below us.

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Taylormade Triumph

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#WardyOut

OSCC, 181-4, beat Old Albanians, 154-9, by 27 runs It might have taken a while but on a day where skipper Marc Ward was absent in a bid to seduce Snow White along with six similarly diminutive accomplices, Offley finally found a way to win a game. Perhaps it was because Old Albanians were even more hopeless than Offley; perhaps because even a blind squirrel sometimes finds an acorn and on this day Dan Goord located the middle of the bat; and perhaps the addition of Ben Southgate, someone who clearly knows what he is doing, combined to lead Offley to their first league victory of the season. For some reason Offley, a team who can at times consider themselves fortunate to play on a needle-strewn, dog-shit littered, pikey-infested council wasteland, found themsleves playing on one of the premier venues in Hertfordshire and raised their game accordingly. They might have found a way to drop eight catches (in fairness only four players shelled a catch but each of them compensated by dr...

The Darkest Day

OSCC 189-8 beat Bedford 107 all out by 82 runs And so it came to pass on Sunday September 3rd, 2023, that the curse of Captain Scott was fulfilled as Scott Boatwright's men joined Josh Scott's hapless crew in taking the relegation plunge. After 26 years of cricket as Offley & Stopsley CC, the 2023 vintage have achieved what no one else could, or have indeed really come close to. The Double Dip. Offley headed into the game having lost 15 of their past 17 Beds League games dating back to the end of last season. Despite including four TCWs (Two Club Wankers) in Ben Wiles, James Barker, Kaiz Ul Haq and Little Man of Many Cubs himself, Rehaan Samdani, Offley failed to stay up despite inflicting a crushing defeat on Bedford, the one team in the division inept enough to finish below us. Kaiz made his highest score for the club, registering his first league 50 and top-scoring with 56. Wiles made 31 and Barker did what Barker does, namely running amok amid the tail like a ...

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