Binfield Cricket Club's Women's 1st XI were beaten by ten wickets at home by Stony Stratford CC on Sunday 19 July in the Home Counties Women's Cricket League Premier Division, Grace Tarling's stunning 5 for 6 - three of them in her opening over - reducing the hosts to 27 for 9 before a defiant last-wicket stand of 40 between Kali-Ann Docherty (25 not out) and Tatiana Sumares lifted Binfield to 67.

Some afternoons belong entirely to one bowler, and this one belonged, utterly, to Stony Stratford's Grace Tarling. Binfield won the toss and chose to bat on their own ground, and the innings was effectively over inside a couple of overs. Into the attack came Tarling, and in the space of six deliveries she bowled Evie Folwell, then Layla Judge, then Monika Nicholls - three wickets in a single, devastating over that left Binfield reeling at 7 for 3. When she returned for her third over she struck twice more, accounting for Isobel Carson and Phebe Salter, and her figures came to read like something from a fever dream: four overs, a maiden, five wickets for six runs. With Elizabeth Dixon (2 for 19) picking off Poppy Evans and Millie Roberts at the other end, and Issy Maclay grinding out fully eighteen deliveries for a single run before she too fell, Binfield subsided to a barely credible 27 for 9.

What followed was, in its own defiant way, the innings of the afternoon. Nine down for 27 and all but beaten, Binfield's last pair simply declined to go quietly. Tatiana Sumares and the wonderfully composed Kali-Ann Docherty, in at number eleven, put on 40 for the tenth wicket - very nearly two-thirds of the entire total - to haul their side to some semblance of respectability. Docherty was the star of it, an unbeaten 25 built on five clean fours, fully four-fifths of her runs coming in boundaries, and she saved her brightest strokes for last, twice finding the rope off Holly Arnold in a cheering late flourish. Only when Sumares was at last stumped for a battling 14 did the innings close, on 67 - of which that single heroic stand had contributed a remarkable 40.

Kali-Ann Docherty · 25 not out

Sixty-seven was, in all honesty, never going to be enough, and so it proved - though not for any want of effort with the ball. Phebe Salter, Layla Judge, Zoe Docherty and Kali-Ann Docherty each sent down a maiden and gave away next to nothing, not one of them conceding more than seventeen, but with so slender a total to protect there was simply no room to attack. Stony Stratford's openers were untroubled throughout: Amelia Ridgway anchored the chase with an unbeaten 40 from 59 balls, seven fours among them, Hamsika Maddineni kept her company on 11 not out, and the visitors cantered to 71 without loss inside the fifteenth over. The Statistics worm tells the story plainly - after Binfield nosed briefly ahead in the opening exchanges, Stony Stratford's line climbed clear from the fourth over and never looked back, while Binfield's lay flat and becalmed through the long middle of the innings.

There is no dressing up a ten-wicket defeat, and it leaves Binfield Cricket Club's Women's 1st XI at the foot of a demanding Premier Division headed by the runaway leaders Charlbury, with Stony Stratford's win lifting them to a healthy fourth. Yet there was real character here to build upon: a thrifty, wicketless-but-tidy bowling effort, and above all that magnificent last-wicket stand and Kali-Ann Docherty's unbeaten 25, an innings of genuine steel on a chastening day. Every generous word, too, for Stony Stratford and the quite exceptional Grace Tarling, whose five for six will take some beating anywhere this season. Better days lie ahead for this young Binfield side; of that there can be little doubt.