Binfield Cricket Club's 6th XI won by nine wickets away at Emmbrook and Bearwood CC on Saturday 1 August 2026, a friendly in which Zoe Docherty's 3 for 21 and Phebe Salter's 3 for 45 helped bowl the hosts' 5th XI out for 170, before Mitesh Patel's unbeaten 68 from just 32 balls - eleven fours and three sixes - raced the chase home inside 24 overs alongside Charlie Miles' unbeaten 44.

Do not be taken in by the gentle word 'friendly'. This was a proper piece of cricket on a warm afternoon at Holme Grange School, and it turned on one of the more startling innings any Binfield side has played this season. What a joy!

Emmbrook and Bearwood won the toss, chose to bat, and for an hour looked entirely comfortable. Ibrahim Mir and Nilesh Gupta opened with 86 together, Mir striking six fours in a 29-ball 31 and Gupta going on to 51 from 45 with eight fours and a six. Then Binfield's spin took hold. Zoe Docherty had Mir leg-before, had Gupta caught by Tim Vines and had Varad Patil caught by Jon Gould, and with Vines himself claiming two, the innings fell from 86 for 1 to 111 for 5 - four wickets for twenty-five runs. Docherty's final figures were eight overs, one maiden - not a run came off it - twenty-one runs and three wickets, an economy of 2.63 that was the tightest of any bowler on either side who sent down more than four overs.

Omar Baba alone stood in the way after that, coming in at 111 for 4 and batting on until he was ninth out at 164, his 30 from 45 balls including two sixes. Phebe Salter finished with 3 for 45 - she bowled Baba, Darren Keep and had Darsh Parvatikar caught - and Ollie Holden had Brian Swindley leg-before to end it on 170. Wickets fell in pairs at the same score twice over, at 111 and again at 144, which is the sort of thing that tells you a batting order has stopped believing.

The extras columns were untidy on both sides, and they matter here. Of Emmbrook and Bearwood's 170, some 29 runs were extras - the runs a fielding side gives away in wides, no-balls and byes, added to the batting side's total - 13 of them wides from Binfield's attack, with Tim Vines and Aadhav Muthu contributing five apiece. Emmbrook and Bearwood's own bowlers were less disciplined still, handing Binfield 26, of which 15 were wides.

And then Mitesh Patel. Joshua Snelling and Charlie Miles had made a watchful start - 73 together for the first wicket, Snelling's 33 taking 47 balls - before Snelling fell to Nilesh Gupta. What followed was an unbroken 98 in which Patel simply took the bowling apart: 68 not out from 32 deliveries, eleven fours and three sixes, a strike rate of 212.50, with 62 of his 68 runs coming in boundaries. Miles held the other end serenely for an unbeaten 44 from 67. Where Emmbrook and Bearwood had taken 37.1 overs to make 170, Binfield needed 23.2 to pass it - better than seven an over against their four and a half. Rohit Ranwadkar's four overs for two runs, two of them maidens, were the one spell nobody could touch; everything else was fair game.

A marvellous day out for a side in good order, and Emmbrook and Bearwood - a club founded in 1889 and just down the road in Wokingham - were, as ever, thoroughly good hosts. Splendid stuff from the sixes.