Report by Daniel Mortlock:
On a glorious day it seemed a no-brainer to bat first upon winning the toss, but this didn't look so clever as we slumped to 87/5 half-way through our innings. Sasha Barras (14 off 15 balls), Harry Houlder (18 off 24 balls), Joss Dare (19 off 46 balls), Cliff Dare (12 off 28 balls) and Rowland Graham (14 off 20 balls) had all made starts before being stopped - rather decisively in the case off Joss, who had his metatarsal broken by an in-swinging yorker from the best of the Naunton bowlers (?. Hughes, who had figures of 3/8 at one stage). Fortunately, we had strength in depth, and Will Taunton-Burnett batted like he was playing a different game, and with support from Richard Graham (14 off 20 balls), lifted us past 200, and well into the ascendancy. Wilty started the final over on 73, needing a mere 27 runs from his ton, and decided to give it a crack, smashing the first three balls of the final over for 4, 2 and 6. He got a good piece of the fourth ball as well, but was well caught on the boundary and so had to be content with 85 from just 56 balls, with 11 fours and 4 sixes. That should have been that, but both Rob Harvey (3 off 18 balls) and Daniel Mortlock (0 off 1 ball) tried to do pick up where Wilty had left off, but only managed to hit two more catches, thus giving Spiers (4/30) an end-of-innings hat-trick.
Thus emboldened, Naunton made a good fist of their chase, trundling along at around their required rate of 5 an over for most of their innings. Joe White (2/34), Sasha Barras (1/24) and Richard Graham (2/19) all took wickets, but there were also sufficiently many loose balls that we were never dominant. Not that it was from lack of trying, as evidenced by Wilty who, presumably worried that he hadn't yet made a sufficient contribution, made a near-suicidal attempt to take a back-pedaling catch on the boundary line and succeeded only in tumbling back over some bushes and vanishing from view. Wilty survived, but his knee made the ultimate sacrifice, and he limped his way through the rest of the tour (which is more than could be said for Joss, why by this stage had returned from A&E with his foot in a cast). All this meant that Naunton started the final over on 203/5, needing an almost plausible 17 from 6 balls. But they had no rampaging WTB at the crease and we had an aggrieved Harry Houlder feeling hard done by that edges and mis-hits hadn't gone to fielders. The result was the game's second final over hat-trick, only the second ever for FAS, leaving Harry with innings-topping figures of 3/27 and the match safely in the bag.