Bootham Park v Wellington 4th June 2006 at The Retreat

Back Row:Wayne Kenny, John Patrick, Pete Mitchell, Richard Todd, Wayne McMahon. Front Row: Nathan Ellison, Jonny Wilkins, Kev Scully, Will Outhart.

Bootham Park (35) lost to Welllington (39-0) by 10 wickets

I guess one of the reasons we carry on playing this frankly ludicrous game is its constant ability to confound expectations. Coming into this game on the back of a 179-run victory, you might have expected us to put together an imposing total. You'd have been wrong.

It didn't help that two players dropped out late on the morning of the game, but neither does it excuse the way we batted. Through a heady combination of accurate bowling and piss-poor batting, we collapsed to an unseemly 35 all out. Virtually alone in a raft of ducks, Wayne Kenny carved out 10 useful runs through the off side before exposing his stumps once too often to Baldock's brisk medium pace. I contributed a less-than-fluent 12 before gifting John Galloway yet another stumping. Apart from that and the obligatory comic runout, all the wickets were either bowled or lbw.

With that sort of total, we never really had a chance with the ball as Steve Relf and Danny Sampson knocked off the runs.

Undetererred, we challenged them to a second game. We lost that too.

There was one ray of sunshine in Jonny Wilkins's brillliant 41 from 28 balls, but on the whole it was a pretty grim day for us. The solitary, microscopic crumb of comfort sustaining me is that every season seems to have its hopeless nadir and it's as well to get it out of the way early.

Last year it was even worse...