There are days in sport, when all its beauty comes together. They are the days when talent, peak physical fitness and sublime timing gel as one and legends are made. Today wasn’t one of those days but by any standards, it was one that will go down in Oakley folklore and will be talked about for years to come, mainly by the chairman himself.
To take 5 wickets is an achievement some fine bowlers never achieve. To take six is bordering on ridiculous. To take six including a hat-trick is an outrage that surely, is beyond the realms of possibility.
Not for The Oakley Express it isn’t. A bowler of cunning is a nightmare for batsmen. To see Bob, steaming in, tanned and glistening biceps pumping, is like a scene from the worst nightmares of the finest players. Is this a ludicrously grandiose description? Quite possibly. Is it preposterous and fantastical analysis of Bob’s bowling ability? Again, impossible to rule out. However, one only needs to look at the scorecard.
Think of the finest spin bowlers and how they ply their trade. ‘The googlie’, the ‘wrongun’, ‘the flipper’, ‘the doosra’, the ‘cutter’ and ‘the slider’. Bob utilises none of these. Instead he offers up alternative deliveries including ‘the pie’, ‘the wormburner’, ‘the full toss’ and the ‘I’m fucked if I know what that was’.
As a batsman who can’t bat, Bob knows another batsman who can’t bat when he sees one. As a consequence he can conjure up the type of deliveries that would get him out every time. However, Bob is more than just a cretin. He can also come up with his own ‘wrongun’. It is a delivery that is so bad, it gets in the head of good batsmen who are used to good bowlers.
As the late June sunshine shone on Oakley Park, there was a moment where cloud cover left the rays of sunshine on Bob only. He stood alone, on a hat-trick, with history in his hands. The trees stopped swaying in the wind, the birds stopped singing and the non existent church bells stopped ringing. I would call it a spiritual moment if I wasn’t lying through my teeth
The batsman twitched, A show of nerves perhaps? The thought of being on the wrong end of history weighing down on him as he saw Bob, with his taught six pack pressing on his tailored extra small sized Oakley shirt. What delivery was coming out of the hand of this genius. no one knew, least of all, Bob himself.
It was ‘the pie’! Floating through the air at about 7mph, it eventually arrived at the feet of the batsman who in his head, knew it was a certain six. It wasn’t the six he wanted though. Oh no, it was a stumping and chaos ensued. A hat-trick and a six for, for Bob.
What a hero.
Bob must now control what lies ahead of him. Fame, women, fast cars, a Christmas number one and trying to pretend Matt Dawson is funny on ‘A Question of Sport’ are all pitfalls that lie in wait.
It won’t be easy.
Alex got 50 by the way.