Beaven Puts East Molesey In A Spin

Paul Bridge writes...

Reigate Priory beat East Molesley by 36 runs Sunday in a first round ECB National Club Championship game, thanks to yet another controlled bowling performance from skipper Luke Beaven of 4-19 in 7.4 overs as well as a sprightly 74 runs from 99 balls from Chris Murtagh, now in his 17th year at the club.
The win puts Reigate through to an away game on May 14 against Horsham, the side that knocked Reigate out of the competition by 60 runs in 2014.
Horsham went through into the second round thanks to Ashtead conceding their first round fixture. The winner of this Horsham-Reigate contest will then meet the winners of the Weybridge-Banstead round two game in early June.
Against East Molesey, Reigate won the toss and opened the batting with a new pairing of Daniel Miller and Oli Hairs. This pair put on 69 in only eight overs before Miller was caught for 16 from 20 balls.
Hairs, who was 48 not out at the time from only 29 balls, had time just to say ‘hello’ to number three batsman Murtagh, before biffing the next ball for a boundary to bring up his maiden half century in 1st team cricket at the Priory before then being bowled the ball after that for 52 at a score of 73-2.
Hairs and Murtagh, as Park Lane spectators know full well, have diametrically opposing styles. Hairs is Mr. Basher or the Big Bopper, if you will. His style is about brute force, taking advantage of early fielding restrictions. You bowl, he swipes. And in this 52 he hit three 6’s and seven 4’s or 88 per cent of his runs in boundaries.
Murtagh is Mr. Quicksilver with deft and delicate shots to pierce the field as he darts from one wicket to the other. In the 74 runs he scored from 99 balls on Sunday, only 16 runs came from boundaries. Where Hairs hardly broke sweat in running a total of four singles, Murtagh ran 31 singles in his innings together with 12 twos and one three, or 58 runs in total, 78 per cent of his runs coming from just that – running, not boundaries.
Partnering Murtagh in a stand of 93 in 18.2 overs was Ben Shoare, currently on furlough from Leeds/Bradford MCCU cricket. He looked a different batsman to the one last year who scored 150 runs in 10 innings with the Priory 1sts with an average score of 21.43 and a high of 29. Now with scores of 43 against Worcestershire and 47 against Kent in Leeds/Bradford fixtures this month, he seems to have found that confidence that made him a Sussex 2nd XI prospect while scoring runs aplenty at Horsham CC before he joined Reigate Priory.
Shoare scored 40 off 54 balls, before popping up a catch to silly mid-on.
Oliver came and went for 2 before Ali Raja joined Murtagh in a stand of 61 that took the score to 232 off 40 overs when Murtagh was the fifth batsman out uncharacteristically running down the pitch to the bowler and being beaten by the ball and subsequently stumped for his 74.
Reigate’s mid-order and tail end batsmen tried to force the pace against the East Molesey bowlers and added 33 runs in the last five overs to post a final score of 265-7 in the 45 overs. Raja made 45 from his 46 balls.
When Hairs is successful in hitting his boundaries at the start of a Reigate Innings, it’s rare that the opposition can match Reigate’s early run rate.
But where Reigate were 76-2 after their first 10 overs, East Molesey matched them with 82-2. Where Reigate were 116-2 after 20 overs, East Molesey were 143-4.
Both openers went relatively cheaply – Jason Moore bowled by Harry McInley for 13 and Simon Barrett, who’s scored runs here before, most notably when he made 73 not out in East Molesey’s win in August 2013, for14. When he was out caught behind by Raja, Barrett became Nick Harrison’s first wicket for the Llamas.
But Andrew Westphal, batting at number three, and Dominic Reed, batting at four, put on 97 runs together. Westphal, a Cardiff MCCU player in 2016 under Brad Scriven’s captaincy, scored 47 in 49 balls, while Reed, a former colleague of Beaven’s at the Unicorns scored 43 (with six 4’s and two 6’s) before he became Beaven’s first victim of the day.
Both batsmen (Reed at 135-3 and Westphal at 139-4) were caught by Shoare in the deep at mid-wicket.
The early Reigate bowling had been expensive. Harrison had gone for 35 runs in his first four overs. McInley had gone for 26 in five overs. Steve Hirst went for 13 in his first over alone. Add in eight byes and the first 10 overs had yielded 82 runs.
So when Beaven came on to staunch this flow of runs, bowling from the pavilion end, he did partially achieve this by bowling five overs for only 16 runs. The problem was that between them in five overs from the Blue Anchor End, McInley and Hirst went for 45 runs meaning a total of 61 runs still came from the second set of 10 overs..
Beaven was later to say when Reed was sent back to the pavilion at 139-4 he felt the game was won at that point. Others without his experience might have disagreed as Sam Burge, East Molesey’s top run scorer in 2016 with 641 runs at 40.06, was now at the crease albeit with a second teamer in Paul Lawford.
Burge and Lawford took the score to 179 by the 25th over before Burge was caught behind off Hirst for 24 in 20 balls. James Smith went cheaply, also off Hirst and when Beaven came back for his second spell at 221-6 after 34 overs, the game came to a rapid conclusion.
Beaven ran through the tail with three quick wickets for just three runs (two bowled and one stumped by Raja), while King saw off Lawford , who batted well for his run-a-ball 36, as Shoare took yet another superb catch in the deep. 221-6 had become 229 all out in the 39th over as Reigate were winners by the relatively comfortable margin of 36 runs and six overs to spare.