Carlton girls played their first fixtures of 2012 with a couple of kwik-cricket fixtures at Loretto.  Despite the lovely mild weather of late, this was always intended to be an indoor match, another first for Carlton girls. 

The match sponsor was Ticketus.com, though unfortunately the promised match sponsorship of £240,000 had been reduced to £2.40 at the last minute.  Whether this was due to recent financial setbacks at Ticketus.com or they had revised their estimate of the prospective value of 3 years’ season ticket sales at Carlton was not disclosed.  Iona wanted to invest the £2.40 by purchasing 1bn euros of Greek government 10 year bonds, but Ella suggested we use it to launch a takeover bid for Rangers and convert Ibrox into a cricket stadium.  However, unfortunately the money has disappeared without trace and administrators Duff and Phelps are trying to track it down.   Rumours are club funds were squandered at a party at Grange Loan for DSK and internal investigations have been carried out.   The Carlton president, at his Monaco winter residence, was unavailable for comment.

My first job of the morning was to turn away Nana Mouskouri, who had turned up looking for a game.  Not many people know that Nana is the biggest selling female artist of all time, eclipsing Madonna, Lady Gaga and even Naomi Campbell.  Mahler must be turning in his grave.  Nana has sold over 300 million records, though obviously on her Greek tax disclosure this was restated as 3 thousand.  To be fair, if the Greek tax inspector had any appreciation of music, this wouldn’t have come as any surprise.  Anyway, after a quick examination of her leg glance and googly, it was decided Nana wasn’t up to scratch.  Nana also recently volunteered to give up her Greek pension to help her country out of its current financial difficulties.  Sounds good until you also hear that she has spent most of her life living in Switzerland.      

Some late call offs had seen Carlton’s average age rise from around P6 to about S1, so we went into the games with an age and experience advantage.  Bowling first, our senior pros Biz and Loobs were the wicket takers, with the 2 taken by Biz in the final over proving crucial.  As we only numbered seven, Ella had to bowl twice – both overs were remarkably accurate, given her bowling action is something akin to a slow motion Malinga.  Chasing 30, we started slowly, with our first two pairs adding a net 10 after the loss of 3 wickets as Loretto put their strongest bowlers up front.  However, our last two pairs, Iona and Jen, followed by Lisa and Lucy, both added 13 to give us a narrow victory by 6 runs. 

In the second match we batted first and put up a great total.  Both wickets we lost were unfortunate – Iona’s favourite shot to square leg was negated as it just bounces of the wall straight back towards the wickets and so Lucy got run out while Loobs nearly hit the only six of the day but was brilliantly caught just in front of the back wall.   Special mention to our junior pair of Jen and Ella, who added an excellent 16 at last pair with Ella hitting some fine fours to the back wall.  Posting 41, our total never really came under threat due to a smattering of wickets throughout Loretto’s innings.  The coach was especially pleased with some excellent catching and our top fielder Lisa was a formidable obstacle to the opposition reaching the back wall.  Lucy had a double wicket maiden and Ella, Iona and Biz took one each leaving Biz as the day’s top wicket taker.

Many thanks go to Loretto for hosting the games and for their hospitality.  Hopefully this early start will lead to additional enthusiasm later this year - as spring already seems to be here, I guess it is roll on summer.