Far From The MCC

~ Est. in 1998 ~

“Howie’s Lost Knock

Found In Antique Shop”

Sunday 22^nd July 2001
Result: Lost by 6 Wkts
Venue: Marcham
35 overs
Jude The Obscure	109 ao
H. Jones 78*
Marcham CC	112 - 4
P. Drake 3 - 17

Not much is known about this match. In fact, the match itself had been consigned to memory for all those involved, as no-one had bothered to copy the bloody scorebook after the conclusion of the game – and so no records of it ever having existing were in print. At least to this team….

Fast forward nearly 4 years, and through sheer fortune and utter coincidence, a random kit bag at a workplace on Milton Park threw up a most wonderful find. In it, was a dusty scorebook dating back to 1999 - the lost property of a certain Marcham Cricket Club. And in this rather decrepit little red book were the scorecards chronicling the lost Marcham game played by the Jude all those years ago! How very strange, and how very wonderful – especially if you are one Howard Jones.

During this unremarkable defeat at the hands of Marcham, the then Jude The Obscure, were indebted in no small part to the contribution to their team total from one H. Jones. Whilst the Jude were registering a not so clever 109 off 31.5 overs, Mr. Jones was single-handedly holding up the opposition by blazing his way to 78 not out. In fact, if you take away the extras (18) from the team total, Howie accounted for 85.7142857% of the runs scored from the blades of Jude batsmen that day! Quite staggering – and even more staggering that no-one bothered to record the feat in ink in the club’s scorebook.

The only other memories of that encounter consist of: one of Howie’s sixes disappearing through a greenhouse window, another of his sixes leading to players demolishing a garden fence trying to retrieve it, and the match being the last anyone ever saw of Paul Drake – despite him returning the excellent figures of 6-0-17-3 with a chronic case of the flu.

So there you go. Howie can now sleep more soundly all these years later in the knowledge that that knock is no longer missing from the team’s records and will be with us for ever more. Unless of course someone loses the website. In which case we’re fucked.

‘W. G. Grace’

*

Statto's Scorecard

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