Some of my top games...

I have played for a lot of different teams over the years and played in a lot of exciting games. Some of them stick out from the crowd a bit more than others however and the "cunning plan" is to write some of them up on this page (in no particular order !)...

Lions v's Wombats: 09/05

This was the plate final at the 2005 Labor Day tournament in Nottingham and is one of my favourite games ever. We fell 6 runs behind in the first and whilst we hung in there after that we never really got back into contention until the 7th. In the 8th I drove in the tying run and then scored the winning run. It doesn't come much sweeter !

Wombats	6	2	0	3	0	5	1	1	18
Lions	2	0	2	2	3	1	7	2	19

As I reported at the time........

"Trailing 10 - 16 after 6 innings of the plate final the Lions roared back to force the game into extra innings, held the Wombats to a single run in the top of the 8th and took the game 19-18 in the bottom of the innings. A six run top of the first had given the Wombats an early lead which they never seriously looked like losing until the Lions late, late rally. The Lions were never in the lead until the winning run crossed the plate. An epic games that had it all, the first Lions final to go into extra innings and the first one we won !"

Felix, Ben, Dave, Derek, Darrell, Tony
Nhan, Michelle, Gill, Lindsay, Carrol, Kelly

Batting Order:	Darrell (RC)	Lindsay (LC)	Felix (SS)	Gill (2)	Ben (LF)	Michelle (3)
	Derek (EP)	Kelly (RF)	Tony (P)	Nhan (C)	Dave (1)	Carrol (EP)

Gill captained the team that day for the first time. I decided to quit after we failed to win promotion to Division 1. I wouldn't want to take anything away from her win but in some ways that tournament was the last hurrah of "my" Lions team. Felix and Ben never played for the Lions again but at least we finished on a winning note. The team that played in 2006 would be a different beast.

More Lions v's Demons: 08/07

The More Lions produced the best display of their first Manchester tournament in this well played game. Our fielding had been fairly shaky in the first few games but we clicked in this one. This was a timed game but we played a full seven innings. As the box score shows it was tight all the way through with a seventh innings rally just proving enough to give us the win...

More Lions	0	0	0	2	0	0	3	5
Demons	0	1	0	3	0	0	0	4

Whilst everyone enjoys scoring runs for me the best games are always these tense low scoring ones where any single play can tilt the result one way or the other. In this game letting in 3 runs in the bottom of the 4th after we had just taken the lead was a potentially fatal body blow, but we kept our nerve, kept making the plays and got our reward.

Batting Order:	Rob (L)	Jamie (P)	Derek (EP)	Manda (3)	Darrell (SS)	Sally (LC)
	Dave (1)	Bev (2)	Will (C)	Emma (RF)	Tom (RC)	Kim (EP)

The win took us through to the Semis of the plate where we defeated the Swingers. In the final we played the Demons again. That second time they beat us but it was another good game and during the day we not only won the team's first silverware but also showed that we could compete with decent established teams

Nhan, Emma, Fi, Kim, Manda, Bev, Jamie, Sally
Tom, Dave, Rob, Darrell, Will