Second match report by James Drake

The next day, we rocked up to the ground to find that only seven of the opposition had turned up, so we lent them our Vinohrady ringers and settled for playing a nine-a-side, (notionally) 40-over match.

Vienna won the toss and put themselves in, and skipper Honz turned to Rohit to deliver the opening salvos. The Rocket did not disappoint, his spiteful five-over spell claiming one wicket for a miserly 17 runs.

First change was Andrew Wills, who duly – i.e. as you do took off his shirt (the left sleeve of which, he maintained, “got in the way”), handed it to the umpire, and began pacing out his run-up. For an age, the tumbleweed rolled and silence reigned as bemused players and officials struggled to digest (i) the spectacle of a semi-nude Wills, (ii) the absurdity of his explanation, and (iii) the matter-of-fact manner in which he articulated what he clearly felt to be an eminently reasonable line of thinking. In the end, Wills was persuaded to swop shirts with a colleague whose armhole arrangements were more to his liking – at any rate, they didn’t hinder a creditable four overs that yielded only 21 runs.

It was Roy, however, taking over from Vijay at the other end, who made the real breakthrough, having the previous day’s PCC hero, Soucek, caught behind just as he was starting to work up a fresh sweat. Stumpy’s thick edge sent the ball into a looping dolly drop, and the Honz at first slip, having computed speed and trajectory in a trice, dived forward, arms outstretched, towards the point at which he calculated the ball was due to land, beating it to the spot by a good half second. Some would say he made a meal of it. Older heads – more versed in the demands that Vienna’s rarified atmospheric conditions place on close-in fielding– judged it easily the second best slip catch ever taken by a PCC man in Vienna.

Vojta Hasa atoned for his previous day’s duck with an appropriately aristocratic 36, but once he had fallen to a botched pull, the rest of the wickets tumbled rapidly enough, with Rohit returning to help mop up tail-end resistance. The last man fell to the Honz, loitering with intent at mid-wicket, who plucked a left-handed stonker out of thin air off one of Sudhir’s part-time floaters.

All out for 160, then – not a huge total, but still smarting from our Saturday spanking, we were eyeing the scoreboard nervously as Rahul and Sudhir stepped out to face the Viennese attack.

We needn’t have worried. An hour and a half or so later, the Kashmir/Karnataka combo had posted, respectively, an undefeated 64 and 70. They were both lovely knocks, but from a classicist’s point of view, Sudhir’s innings was perhaps particularly easy on the eye – what a weapon the PCC has in the Mangalore Express.

Honour saved, we drove back to Prague with our heads held high.