Prestcold

Sunday July 12 in Binfield Heath

Strollers won by six wickets

Prestcold 170
(34.5 overs; Macaulay 3-36, Broster-Turley 2-25, Rogers 2-26, Oliver 1-17, Dela Rue 1-24, Salvesen 1-26)
Strollers 173-4
(30.4 overs; Travis 50, Pittams 46, Millar 27, Bourke 17)

I had never before been to Prestcold – a clear and obvious gap in my Strolling CV. If you want to be respected as a Stroller you must have been to Prestcold, everyone knows that. But more importantly it has irked me for some time to have such a significant piece missing from my pursuit of ‘Strollers fixtures bingo’.

Given the fixture list changes every year, achieving Strollers fixtures bingo arguably isn’t even a realistic concept – but it’s exactly that unattainability that makes it so alluring! As an accomplished and rarely challenged player of urinal bingo (which requires one to urinate at all of the urinals in a pub or brewery during a single visit) and club bingo (victory at which is achieved by using all of the golf clubs in your bag as quickly as possible in a round), the idea of actually being tested for once in a game of made-up bingo is something I’ve been yearning for.

The likes of Wall and BROOSTER-Turley (the laggardly flogs!) have been unable to offer me any challenge whatsoever at either of urinal or club bingo, and eventually it gets lonely at the top of the mountain.

Last year I missed the Prestcold fixture because the Lord had invited me to see The Grade Cricketer at the Hammersmith Apollo. This year the Lord was match manager for the Prestcold fixture, so of course I accepted his invitation to play. I’m hoping this time next year we’ll continue our wee tradition and he’ll invite me to Turks and Caicos, where I expect we’ll have a grand time.

On a searingly hot day the outfield looked like a mixture of Kolkata and Mars, scorched of all moisture, but adorned with a big old tree behind the bowler’s arm at one end! Skipper Glen Oliver lost the toss and was invited by his fellow captain to have first go at bringing to life the extensive and cerebral bowling change and fielding placement stratagems they’d both spent their Saturday nights devising.

With several Strollers delayed by a whole range of alleged issues, including a fire at Stratford Train station, cancelled trains, slow trains, and failing to deduce that the correct side of the station to be picked up from was the side I was on (guys in future having fewer excuses will make your lack of culpability for your tardiness more believable), Oliver was probably wishing we were batting first.

With the delayed group including arguably the three leading candidates to open the bowling in Freddie BROOSTER-Turley, His Lordship and Saviour James Dela Rue and my good self, Glen got creative and opened the bowling himself. If I was excited about my first time at Prestcold, I was doubly tumescent to see this for the first time!

Among many advantages to Oliver opening the bowling is his efficient run-up, which got our over-rate off to a cracking start. Given Oliver takes about 25 minutes to face his first delivery when batting due to his glacial walk-out speed and insurmountable need to fiddle with the sightscreens and count the fielders just in case the oppo has snuck on an extra man, one could argue that getting through his overs quickly when bowling is the least he can do.

To be clear, that is precisely what I am arguing here.

After finishing his first over Oliver scratched his head and decided to go with Dela Rue from the other end. Pittams and BROOSTER-Turley exhibited sour looks and kicked at the ground sullenly for a while, before cheering themselves up by playing a game of plane spotting with first slip Blair Travis.

Prestcold’s proximity to Heathrow and prevailing wind conditions meant fielders were in for an absolute treat all day, with all manner of large, predominantly white, planes able to be identified. If it gets much better than standing in a hot sunny field with your mates (plus the captain who deludedly has decided not to let you open the bowling) pointing out planes and making plane noises, I’m yet to find out about it (although this time next year in Turks and Caicos I very well may do).

With some variable bounce able to be extracted from a good length, Oliver was a handful for the batters and also Strollers wicketkeeper Jake Helsby, who did an excellent job both of catching the ball and preventing any facial injuries to himself.

However, it was the Lord who made the first breakthrough via a knee-high full toss outside leg stump which Prestcold opener Chaz Mayhew hospitably top edged to three-quarters fine leg – almost exactly where Glen had placed himself. 2026 Glen is 10kg trimmer than the 2025 version (maybe he’s trying to get down to welterweight for a shot at Connor McGregor?) and had no trouble moving quickly into position to make a difficult catch look easy.

Oliver the bowler was also soon in on the action too, luring the other opener Phil Desbois to pop a catch to Hector Millar, deputising for Brad Trebilcock at short cover while Trebley holidays in the French countryside with his all-but-betrothed.

The Lord made way (after an excellent spell of which by far the worst delivery netted him his wicket – not a bad effort for a man who had spent 17 straight hours on his couch the day before watching rugby and cricket) for Tom Salvesen, whom this reporter is of the view has found a new lease of life and is bowling better than he has in years.

This has coincided with his children flying the coop and turning Tom into an empty nester, replete with mental and physical energy to devote to his bowling. Tommy Sal was rewarded with a wicket (another catch by Millar at short cover – will Trebley get his spot back when he returns to the side!?) in an unbroken spell of 1-26 from his seven overs. Oliver also bowled his seven straight (1-17) – very impressive efforts in the heat.

Stevie Rogers was at his reliable best in picking up 2-26, unsurprising really when you consider how close Prestcold is to his house (he must know the conditions well). Rogers and Salvesen made way for Alastair Macaulay and BROOSTER-Turley. That the BROOSTER was considered a candidate to open the bowling but ended up bowling at the same time as Stair, whom we must therefore implicitly consider him to be in the same speed category as now, says more for his bowling than this match report ever could.

The BROOSTER finished with 2-25, and Stair 3-36 as Prestcold’s innings was wrapped up for 170 after 34.5 of their allotted 35 overs. Prestcold No 3 Andrew Towse top scored with a well compiled 53.

It was an uncharacteristically accurate bowling and fielding performance from the Strollers, Oliver holding three good catches, Sean Bourke one, and Millar two.  Rogers put in an absolute shift on the boundary, repeatedly needing to climb over the fence to fetch the ball from the nearby paddock (which had three pretty ponies in it whose coats looked nearly as gleaming and silky as the several days of stubble Stair was sporting). What made this particularly impressive was that at no stage did Stevo fall over said fence and break his arm – Jordan Henderson take note.

Bourke showed characteristic commitment in sliding to stop a ball, re-opening the wound on his knee which had bled so profusely at West Chilts a few weeks back. Wary of the threat of sharks, bears, and other predators who are attracted by the smell of blood (which is notoriously greater around Reading than in West Sussex), Bourke sensibly got his knee bandaged up to prevent the type of haemorrhaging we saw at West Chilts.

Freddie and Jake were quite hot in the sun so decided to roll up their sleeves and treat us all to a gun show – generously declining to charge for admission. Unfortunately the team was let down by one individual (your match reporter), whose numerous ground fielding errors were delightedly pointed out by our Lord James ‘DELARUEBANGER’ Dela Rue. “OOOHHHHHH PITTO! Did you think you were the Strait of Hormuz during a ceasefire when you let that one through!!???”. “OOOOOOOHHHHHH ANOTHER ONE!!! You’re like an under-fire tanker out there!”. [As a finance professional in the gas industry our Lord is slightly obsessed with Middle Eastern geopolitics at the moment].

In my defence I was a bit distracted correctly identifying so many majestically climbing and banking white Airbus A380s and keeping track of all the points I was awarding myself. It’s not as easy as it looks to constantly be winning all the games that I make up.

It was a BYO tea job. I opted for a cheese/ham/olive pinwheel sort of baked good. The Lord tucked into some leftover fish pie that he’d whipped up for himself on Friday (when of course he never consumes meat). Stair brought a richly fragranced container of feijoada he had prepared for himself that morning – every day’s a school day. It turns out Stair is a huge fan of Brazilian pork dishes. Who knew?

Glen ate nothing and sat in the sun to try to sweat off another couple of kgs like Toby Maguire in Seabiscuit. Freddie had six sandwiches, having visited every supermarket chain in the morning to get a meal deal from each (but it was definitely the fire at Stratford and the slow trains that caused him to be late) to achieve something he was trying to call ‘meal deal bingo’. Unfortunately for Floggie Freddie that isn’t a game that exists so his efforts counted for nothing.

I didn’t notice what everyone else had as I was tucking into my pinwheel with the sort of lust and lack of eyes on the ball I usually reserve for swinging across the line (on which, more to come! #spoilers).

Bourke and Travis opened the Strollers’ response against the Rosier father-son duo of Andy and Luke (which surely must be unique among our opposition!?) with detailed instructions from Skipper Oliver that survival was of much higher priority than run rate.

Starting slowly (including their running between the wickets, which elicited many a proclamation from our Lord – on his day the Lord doth Proclaim) the two got into gear and negotiated the variable bounce well.

After an opening stand of exactly 50, Bourke perished to the very accurate Rosier Junior, skying one to mid-on. Travis hasn’t played often in recent weeks but he’s clearly been spending a good number of hours shadow batting in front of the mirror. He reached a typically elegant half-century full of high elbowed straight and cover drives before edging behind.

He was replaced at the crease by the arguably even more elegant Millar, who had spent the previous day at the Henley Festival dressed in a pair of tartan trou that would make a wolverine purr. Though Hector wasn’t willing to bat in the trou, or to catwalk them after the match, he has agreed to post a daily series of selfies of himself wearing them in the Strollers WhatsApp channel running from now until the end of the season. So look out for those soon; what a treat!

Millar continued his excellent form with a boundary-laden 27 before being caught and bowled by Rosier Senior. Helsby came in with a financial incentive from his teammates to hit his first ball for six – which he very nearly achieved. He almost boofed a maximum a few balls later – again falling short by one bounce – but suffered the ignominy of having it downgraded to just two because it had brushed some leaves of the tree on its way through.

I was finding the inconsistent bounce tricky to deal with and received blows to the bicep and arm. Despite those clearly being areas of my anatomy that are well protected by muscle, by some sort of freak chance both deliveries found their way to soft doughy spots and caused me to whimper a little bit.

With only a few runs required for victory I mistook a leg-spinner from Towse for a cheesy pinwheel and skied an agricultural hoick to bring Oliver to the crease to finish things off. Reading the room and understanding how thirsty everyone was, Glen significantly sped up his usual process to be ready to face and expeditiously despatched a couple of boundaries to allow the handshaking to commence.

Simon had arrived to watch the last hour or so and joined us for post-match drinks during which he permitted himself some well-earned cantankerousness about the McCullum and Starmer regime changes. Salvesen stopped short of declaring his hat to be in the ring to take over from McCullum – probably reluctant to get too busy again lest it affect his bowling form.

A wonderful day finished with Jannik Sinner defending his Wimbledon title, and some gentle arm-twisting by Rogers, who offered his local tour guiding services to show us the sights of a local watering hole for further refreshment.

As a Strollers fixture Prestcold gets an ‘A tier’ from me – glorious sunny conditions, friendly opposition, excellent plane watching, and a top-notch sun trap for post-match beers. I’ll be back! 

Capt: Glen Oliver Wkt: Jake Helsby.
Match fees: Alastair Macaulay. Match report: Mike Pittams.