Every year our friends based at Lords and elsewhere make a weekend pilgrimage to play in the flat lands. Saturday is Newmarket and this year both halves of the MCC-Newmarket trophy were reunited for the first time since 2015. (Having seen the newly reunited trophy pieces I can sort of understand why, as it was not obvious that the two pieces had anything to do with each other!)

Of course the match ended in a tie (4-all, including 3x 7-all, 40-all’s) so the winner to be engraved on the trophy had to be decided by a games countback which ended by a margin of 2 in favour of the hosts. ‘Never in doubt’ as someone muttered….

Sunday was Cambridge and a 10am start which stretched the coffee making resources and biscuit supply somewhat. In order to avoid the plethora of 7-all’s of the previous day, all matches were a single set to 10 of which only 2 went to to 9-all which kept the schedule more or less on track. Cambridge took the honours (5-3) including all 4 matches on Fortress Green. So no countback was needed to decide on the engraving although the absence of any trophy (lost or found) made this somewhat academic.

Thanks to Mark and Peter for their marking and post match encouragements. We look forward to visiting Lords in December and the return, here in the Fens, next May.