Champions defence off to a sticky start
Sawston and Babraham’s AVL East Anglian Premier League (EAPL) defence got of to the worst possible start when they were defeated by Mildenhall, by four wickets, with just two balls to go. More worryingly for the Rams this was their fourth defeat in the last five games in the competition.
On Saturday they lost the toss, which certainly played its part in the result, and were asked to bat. The Sawston side opened up with Ralph Haywood, one of four debutants, and Jack Beaumont. The nineteen-year-old opener and his more experienced partner gave the home side an excellent start taking the score to eighty-four in the fifteenth. Hayward (52 from 53 balls) dominated the partnership and was looking to add another boundary to his impressive knock when he picked out Jack Loveday at square leg off the bowling of Jonah Handy. His opening partner Beaumont (28) followed him back to the pavilion just sixteen runs later just as the Rams had reached three figures and giving Handy his second victim. The new pair of Ethen Rice and Ben Claydon had added thirty-four runs in seven overs when Rice became Handy’s third scalp (3-63) in the twenty seventh over. Another debutant Dan Andrew was deceived by Kc Cariappa ,the EAPL’s leading wicket-taker for each of the last two seasons. However, Claydon in partnership with Lee Thomason then consolidated adding a fifty partnership and taking the Rams to two hundred and one with twelve overs to go. At that point the Sawston outfit must have been eyeing a score of two-eighty. The visitors had other ideas as the Rams then lost Claydon (54 from 64); Thomason (17); Wayne White (7); Ben Clilverd (1) and another of their debutants James Sykes (7) as they lost five wickets for just twenty-four runs in thirty-three balls! The combination of pace from Loveday (3-59) and the spin of Cariappa (3-34) shared the spoils. It was left to Rams skipper Callum Guest, batting at eight, and the home sides’ fourth debutant Raj Singh to bat out the final six overs and get the Sawston side to a respectable total. The pair added thirty-five at almost a run a ball to get the Rams to a challenging two hundred and sixty for nine in their fifty over allocation.
The Rams were given an early boost when Beaumont (1-32) trapped Freddie Bowser, a recruit from Skegness, in the first over. Mildenhall’s most successful batsmen from 2025, Matt Allen and Darren Ironside (31 from 58) , then added an impressive eighty-seven run partnership before Sykes picked up his first wicket for the Club. Allen (82 from 89) was looking like the first centurion of the season when his fluent knock came to an end off the bowling of Rice (1-49) with the score on one hundred and thirty-six at the start of the thirty-first over. There was no panic from the visitors as Dom Palmer (45 from 45) and his skipper Tristan Blackledge added a valuable forty-eight runs at a run a ball before the former gave Singh (1-46) his first Rams wicket. Blackledge then found another useful ally when he was joined by Jon Allen as the pair added another forty-eight runs to take the visitors to two hundred and thirty-two. Blackledge who tends to enjoy batting at Sawston then departed (49 from 57) as Sykes picked up his second wicket (2-58). Mildenhall required a further twenty-nine runs from twenty-one balls for a first ever win at Spicers. When White (1-52) picked up the dangerous Cariappa the visitors required just fifteen more runs from fourteen balls. They reached the winning line with Allen (34 from 34) and Loveday (12 from eight) unbowed with just two balls remaining.
Claydon and Hayward both made their second half-centuries of the weekend and were joined by Andrew as all three retired not out as Cambridgeshire warmed up with a win in a friendly with London Schools Cricket Association; ahead of their competitive opener against Cheshire next Sunday.