The lions lost their first competitive game when they played Wanstead & Snaresbrook u13B. We won the toss and put the opposition into bat because the pitch was damp and we felt it would dry out later in the morning. The Lions bowled well but the fielding should have been better given the high standards we have set over the last three years. We still managed to keep Wanstead to a reasonable total of 106 off 20 overs and we only had 10 players. The boys were confident of chasing it down this total and we got off to a solid start from Joe and Remy scoring quite freely in the first 3 overs. When we lost Remy in the fourth over we had Nathan at the crease and he started to build a partnership with Joe until we lost Nathan. The game changing moment came after that when we lost Joe and Ibrahim in quick succession and this put more pressure on the lower order batters. However, Dhruv put in a valiant effort to keep the runs going with support from Zak and then some rear guard action from Shivan and Daniel nearly got us over the line but we fell short in the end.
This is not the end of the world, more of a wake up call for the boys because we now have to win all our remaining games in the group stage to go through to the knockout stages of this competition.
So it's back the training ground where we need to improve on our bowling, batting and fielding to allow us to step up our game.
Well done to the boys, plenty of positives such as the mental toughness and game awareness and we also had a good post match debrief where the boys are showing more maturity by objectively analysing and solving their own problems.

Regards
Paul...