Business get less than ideal introduction to K2

Big Bamboo, 10am Sunday. After a big night such as Saturday one feels thankful for being in the Business team and not having a 7:30 am start. Hung-over red eyes soon made way for cross eyes on the bus, as KC and Oscar debated the merits of foreign currency investments all the way to Pu Dong.

We were greeted at the ground by a rather optimistic looking pleasure side, who were really talking up the prospects of a Bashers Day repeat. Shortly after Loosey took his pants off and everything went downhill for them from there.

Stats won the toss for a change and found himself wondering in the wilderness of the unknown, with the responsibility of having to make a decision. He regained himself to confidently put them into bat and entrusted the heavily bowler stacked Business team to, um, do the business.

We then threw ourselves into a warm-up, which pretty much zapped us of all our energy. But luckily, Kooka pies saved the day and we were savoury filled and good to go. With Ewoks at the crease and Chewbacca behind the stumps, we were poised for a galactic showdown. If only Poo Jabber the Hut was still with us.

Our day in the blistering sun could have not have started better. The opening bowlers frustrated the batsman, and showed huge amounts of discipline early on, in taking more wickets than they bowled extras. Reeling at two down for one run, the visitors needed some innovation. Their number 3 and 4 batsmen took them through to 15/2 after 8 overs, with a batting display which made waiting in line at the Entry-exit Bureau seem like a Rolling Stones concert.

We were lured into a false sense of security by their inability to play any cricket shots. Soon to follow was a free lesson on how to hit everything in the air yet avoid being caught and how to slog everything to the fence. Before we realized what was going on HMS Business was hemorrhaging runs, and not taking a lot of wickets. Poor Filthy was doing a lot of fetching practice out on the square leg boundary. The sun was destroying us, The Kooka pie energy boost had worn off and we were in a bit of trouble. Dipso managed to sober up in time to roll the arm over and proceeded to take an unprecedented four wickets. It was a mere highlight in what was otherwise our most disappointing effort with the ball, this season. I would mention that James Blunt’s three catches behind the stumps were…beautiful. But given he is doing that pretty regularly it’s hardly newsworthy. But he did let through four byes, which is pretty much unheard of. So the net result was they had scored somewhere between 278 and 2 million. Either way, it was a lot and we were going to have to really earn our victory beers.

We did not get ourselves off to a particularly good start and were 3 down in the fourth over. Stats and Sir Dick set about forming the first partnership of the innings. However they were cut off in the dawn of their partnership, when Stats was tempted one time too many, on the last ball before drinks. Sir Dick took a bit of liking to the K2 spin attack and for a moment there anything seemed possible as the RR got back on track. He was joined by a promoted Paps who looked lively, before getting a bit excited and chopping it on to his stumps. Cassius then came out to face some spin and the usually amount of potty mouth language was then unloaded for all in sundry.

The tail unfortunately didn’t wag as long and as hard as it had in previous games. Oscar was unlucky to be run out to direct hit. We only needed 22 overs to prove we weren’t quite with it with the bat, leaving our score sheet to read like binary code. With the exception of Sir Dick who ended up on 68 and the extras who nearly made it to 30. In summary, we still don’t know what K2 actually stands for and the only thing more breath-taking than Dean’s thighs is a changing room of Pakistanis after an afternoon in the field.