The week long winning streak of the Junior A Boys came to a stuttering halt on Thursday night at a cold and windswept Margaretstown Cricket Ground against The Hills.

Losing is not usually much fun, and this game was no different, but losing at cricket is not normally something that happens at a given point in time, it can be drawn out to maximise the misery, this was one of those days personified. Don't get me wrong, we weren't thrashed and we gave a good account of ourselves, but it wasn't a fun experience somehow.

It was a refixed match that we could have kicked into August, but didn't. It was windy and we didn't like that. The opposition was clearly at full strength and we didn't like the look of that either. The bails kept blowing off the stumps and we didn't like that either.

Anyway - They won the toss and chose to bat - we liked that as we would have put them in anyway! Excellent.

They scored 30 off the first 2 overs.

So the misery continued, we dropped some catches, let the ball through our legs for a couple of boundaries, bowled some wides and the damn bails kept blowing off the stumps - The Hills plodded on, nothing extraordinary, just plodded on.

Fascinating to watch a tractor in the adjacent field keeping a perfect rhythm, up and down. Even turning the corners at the end resulted in a satisfying pattern in the soil.

So they got 153. Slightly above average really, but we have passed that total several times this year so we'd give it a good go.

After 10 overs, we were 36 for 0. We just couldn't get the ball through the field. Excellent fielding from The Hills, tight bowling, few extras (two dropped catches mind!). But they were strangling us.

And the bails, the bails, the falling of the bails.

We tried to push on, Jack got a steady 34 (55 balls) and Sean 14 (31 balls) and Aaron did his best with a hard to get 23 (17 balls). But that was it, we only lost 5 men, but after 20 overs had amassed just 100 runs.

So the best team won, it just wasn't much fun this time.

Big thanks to Ann & Karl for sharing the scoring and for all the parents that came out to support the boys.

We have a returnfixture on August 1st where we'll plan to "pinch" some runs and "punch" through the field on the first day of the month.

The tractor driver was still working away in the gloom when we left the Margaretstown Parish shortly after 9pm.