Binfield Cricket Club's 4th XI won by 200 runs away at Peppard Stoke Row CC on Saturday 1 August 2026, posting 296 for 4 from their forty overs in a Thames Valley Cricket League (TVCL) Division 8B fixture through Adrian Millerick's 68, Carter Daines' 64 and Steve Jeffery's 56, before Thomas Hyde and Ollie Brasier took three wickets apiece to bowl Peppard Stoke Row's 3rd XI out for 96 inside nineteen overs.

My dear old things, two hundred runs is not really a margin at all - it is a whole afternoon's worth of daylight between two sides. Peppard Stoke Row looked at a warm, dry Saturday, won the toss, invited Binfield to have a bat, and then spent forty overs watching four different men help themselves. By the close of the innings the scoreboard read 296 for 4, and the game had long since stopped being a contest.

It was built in layers rather than in one great burst - five Binfield men past 35, and not one of them left to do it alone. Steve Jeffery and Anthony Goff opened with 89 together before Goff went leg-before to Matt Kimber for 36; Jeffery followed him, also leg-before to Kimber, for 56 with the score on 109. That gave Kimber two of the four wickets Peppard managed all day from his eight overs for 40, though Aled Roberts was the tightest of their attack at eight overs for 37, under five an over. What then broke the game open was the third wicket. Adrian Millerick, in at 89 and still there when it fell at 224, put on 115 with Carter Daines - much the biggest stand of the match. Daines was caught for 64 to end it; Millerick went on to 68, and Jakob Hinton finished unbeaten on 39 to see the innings out.

A word, too, about the extras column, since it tells its own quiet story. Of Binfield's 296, fully 31 runs were extras - that is, runs the fielding side gives away in wides, no-balls and byes, which are then added to the batting side's total. Peppard's bowlers sent down 21 wides among them. Binfield's attack, by contrast, conceded 14 extras in the whole of the reply and not a single wide all afternoon. On a day of large numbers, that is as clean a piece of bowling discipline as you will find anywhere in Division 8B.

Two hundred and ninety-seven to win is a long way from a realistic proposition, and the reply never threatened to become one. Thomas Hyde took 3 for 31 from his five overs and Ollie Brasier 3 for 12 from four and a half, while Nathan Warwick was the meanest of the lot - six overs, one of them a maiden, meaning not a run came off it, and just 13 runs conceded for a single wicket. Abinandan Venkatraman, the Binfield captain, brought himself on for one over and had a wicket in it, which is the sort of thing captains dream about and very rarely get. Peppard were all out for 96 in 18.3 overs, Christopher Proudfoot and Ed Bloomer their joint top scorers with 17 apiece.

Two hundred and ninety-six for four, then, and a bowling performance that never let the reply out of the blocks. It leaves the 4th XI second in Division 8B on 245 points, with 22 more in the bank and a run rate that will do them no harm at all come September. Peppard Stoke Row, ninth and thoroughly gracious in a hard afternoon, will have far better days than this one. First-rate stuff.