Published: Wednesday, 14th May, 2008 10:00
Perfect start for Wokingham
By Charles Watts
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Kwame Appiah's fine 42 helped Wokingham to a 28 run victory against Kidlington.
WOKINGHAM picked up their first ever Home Counties League win against Kidlington to get their Division Two West campaign off to the perfect start last Saturday.
The 25 point win sees the Wellington Road outfit sitting proudly at the top of the league after the opening round of fixtures and now captain Martin Bushell has challenged his side to stay there.
Bushell takes his team to the home of Home Counties League newcomers Buckingham Town this Saturday and is now even more convinced that his side can claim the title this season.
He said: “We couldn’t have wished for a better start – to be sitting top with 25 points is fantastic.
“But it’s just the start, we won’t get carried away. We’re on top and that is where we want to stay until the end of the season.
“We know that if we play to our best then we can beat anyone in this league, we just need to keep working hard.”
On Saturday’s game with Buckingham, Bushell said: “They’re an unknown quantity, they’ve just been promoted and we’ve never played against them before so it should be an interesting game.
“We won’t do anything differently. We’ll just go and play our normal game and if we do that we should come back with the win.”
Wokingham will be looking for another strong display from Dan Doran after the Aussie leg spinner picked up a five-wicket haul last Saturday in his first league game back at the club following his return this summer.
“Dan came on early after Dave Taylor had set on our openers a bit,” Bushell said. “As usual he was excellent, he ripped through them while our other bowlers did the job from the other end.”
Earlier Wokingham had been put into bat by their visitors and, despite the loss of three early wickets, they were in a strong position of 138-3 at lunch thanks to Bushell’s 59 and 42 from Kwame Appiah.
But Bushell went first ball after the interval and his dismissal started a collapse which saw the home side all out for just 194.
In response Taylor set about Wokingham’s bowling attack and quickly took the visitors to 70 without loss before Doran had him walking back to the pavilion.
Doran then took control and ended with 5-50 as Kidlington collapsed to 166 all out. Rahu Thava and Martin Wilson both picked up two wickets apiece before a run out sealed maximum points for Wokingham.
Bushell said: “The performance wasn’t quite what we desired but to beat a team like Kidlington without playing that well shows us just what we can do.
“It was tight at the end, they have batsmen down the bottom order who can get runs so we never thought it was over until the last wicket fell.”
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