A full afternoon's cricket (at last!)

Felt really quite tired this morning and so decided to have a bit of a lie-in with Sara and didn’t go to church (I wasn’t on duty anyway).  After a hectic week in Surrey it was pleasant to crash out and not worry about having to be in any certain place at any certain time.  A leisurely morning with a late breakfast followed.  This afternoon I took Tom and his friend Doug along with me to the Ageas Bowl to watch Hampshire take on Durham in the Clydesbank 40-Over series.  This was Doug’s first ever outing to a professional sporting event.  It was an exciting if, at times, slow game.  Durham batted first and put on a modest 200 runs for 7 wickets after 40 overs.  Hampshire, in chasing this rather mediocre score, managed to win by four wickets with a final score of 201 for 6 wickets in the penultimate over of the game.  Although, at first, it seemed that Durham’s total was an easy target, Hampshire did make rather heavy weather of it and at times were behind the Duckworth/Lewis figure.  Still the win left Hampshire, tonight, top of their Group table.  I bought one of the Golden Draw tickets for a £1 today – No. 7303.  To my amazement, and disappointment, the winning ticket was 7313!  How close can you get!  It would have netted me £39 which would easily have paid for the afternoon out and my beer round tonight.  After dropping Doug back at his home in The Wallops with good feelings about watching cricket and declaring that he would like to come along again, I returned to Winterslow and walked down to the Lion’s Head for my usual pint and chat with Richard whom I hadn’t seen in a while.  We caught up on events and agreed that we really must get some golf in before the end of August.  I couldn’t sleep too well tonight – probably because of my lie-in this morning.