Chalfont St Peter's first game in Division 2 started in fine bowling form when Freddie and Ibrahim's conservative first ten overs restricted Marlow to just 27 runs, with the bonus of Freddie taking the first wicket of opener Paskings in the process. Pressure mounted on Marlow's batsmen who quickly fell to 61-5 by the 21st over. However, Marlow's Riddell cemented himself at the crease for nearly 2 hours, which assisted Marlow to recover to get to 156-8 before Riddell on 42 was finally outfoxed by Shahid's spin. The home side finished on 168-8 after their 52 overs.
Needing to achieve 169 runs off 48 overs, Chalfont St Peter had a shakey start achieving just 11 runs off the first 10 overs, with the loss of Hanif for a duck in the process. Asim, who in trying to save four runs in Marlow's innings had strained his right knee, played a heroic innings getting 65 runs from 121 balls. 26 of these runs were achieved with Chalfont's other top scorer Zeddy (32 runs from 45 balls) who between the pair of them put on 58 runs to the score before the 5th wicket fell. However, their efforts were not enough to save Chalfont who lost their last 4 wickets for just 11 runs to finish all out for 146, 23 runs short of a win.
Whilst on paper our first game was a defeat, we have shown that in our batting and our bowling we can play with the big boys in Division 2a and it is these positives we will take into our first home match of the season against Windsor next Saturday.