Shenley cement league lead

12:41pm Friday 8th July 2005

Shenley Village 142-10
Cavendish 85-10
Saracens Hertfordshire League Division Five

Cavendish won the toss on a very humid and overcast day at Shenley's nursery ground on Saturday.

With a slightly green track caused by the previous week's thunderstorms and swing-friendly conditions, Cavendish elected to field first.

It looked like the wrong decision with openers Jemile Al-Darraji and R Gajjar scoring 35 in ten overs before the later batsman was bowled for 22.

This brought Jose Fedee to the crease and the Shenley score advanced to 60 before Fedee was dismissed LBW for 11 runs.

Al-Darraji followed him back to the pavilion three overs later after giving a soft shot straight back to the bowler which he duly caught. Al-Darraji finished the day on 23 runs.

This brought about a collapse of four wickets from the next ten overs to leave Shenley rocking on 89 for seven wickets with only 28 overs bowled.

Ron Brown then made the batting look easy finishing on 38 not out which included one of the biggest sixes seen at Shenley.

With nobody supporting him at the other end Shenley at least had some runs to play with finishing on 142 from 42 overs.

The pick of the Cavendish bowlers was Jayasinghe with five wickets for 31 runs after 16 overs.

Shenley took to the field and Cavendish seemed to be getting off to a good start scoring 30 from eight overs before David Shelley took the first of his five wickets with a display of disciplined line-and-length bowling with lots of help from seam movement both ways.

With the Cavendish batsmen demonstrating too much aggression for the conditions, three wickets fell from Shelley's next three overs — leaving Cavendish on 78-4 wickets from 19 overs.

Shenley looked a team in control when the fifth wicket fell once again to Shelley's bowling.

By the end of his stint, Shelley had sent Cavendish's top five batsmen to the pavilion.

Shelly returned solid figures of five wickets for 25 runs from 14 overs .

N Saqeb was introduced at the other end and cleaned up the Cavendish tail with an absolutely fantastic display of fast bowling, delivering yorker after yorker.

He took his five wickets for only one run in the last four overs of his spell and Cavendish lost their last six wickets for 1 run from 7 overs.

N Saqeb finished with figures of five wickets for 15 runs from seven overs.

A Shenley victory by a margin of 60 runs placed them firmly at the top of the table with a lead over second placed Rickmansworth of 16 points and third placed Old Habs by a margin of 60 points.

With an away game to Hatch End this weekend who are sixth from bottom and 124 points bellow them, Shenley now look to be starting to pull away to a big lead and are certainly the team to beat in division five.

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