Binfield Cricket Club's 1st XI won by two wickets away at Wargrave CC on Saturday 15 August 2026, chasing down 202 in a Thames Valley Cricket League (TVCL) Division 2A fixture after Tom Nower had taken 5 for 34 to bowl Wargrave's 2nd XI out for 201, and captain Sam Kennett had held the innings together with an unbeaten 80.

There are afternoons when a captain simply decides that his side is not going to lose, and settles in until the thing is done. Sam Kennett spent two hours and a quarter at Wargrave on Saturday doing precisely that - 80 not out from 101 balls, still there at the finish, and Binfield's 1st XI home by two wickets with a target of 202 safely behind them.

For a long while it looked as though Wargrave had made rather too many. Avi Pasikanti and Neal Robinson opened with 109 together, both reaching their fifties, and although neither hurried - Pasikanti's 54 took 86 balls, Robinson's 50 took 89 - it was the sort of unfussy platform from which 250 becomes a real possibility. Binfield's Sam Kennett had already been quietly exceptional with the ball, seven overs for 13 runs, under two runs an over, but the breakthrough that mattered came from his fellow Binfield bowler Tom Nower.

And what a turn it took. From 172 for 2 in the 42nd over Wargrave lost three wickets without a single run being added - Kieran Lall, Matthew Townson and Will Clarke gone inside a handful of deliveries, the scoreboard stuck fast on 172 - and from 122 for 1 they contrived to add only 65 more for the loss of eight. Nower, wheeling away through the middle and lower order, finished with 5 wickets for 34 from his ten overs and Binfield's Elliot Coggins took 2 for 39; a last-wicket 14 from Freddie Galtazine Scott dragged Wargrave to 201 all out, which felt at the time like a good deal less than they had been worth at tea.

The reply was, for a considerable stretch, a genuine muddle. James Muir - keeping wicket and opening - flashed 18 from 16 balls with three fours before falling in the fourth over, and Binfield were 51 for 3 inside eleven. Chris Morgan then played the kind of watchful, unglamorous innings a chase of this shape demands, 31 from 54 balls, and his 54-run fourth-wicket stand with Kennett was the biggest of the innings. When Morgan went at 105, and three more followed for the addition of 39, Binfield were 144 for 7 and Wargrave will have fancied themselves handsomely.

Kennett had other ideas. Thomas Williams gave him twenty splendid minutes of company - 18 from 20 balls, three fours - and the pair added 43 for the eighth wicket to take Binfield within sight of the line at 187, whereupon Dylan Wood arrived, made a calm 7 not out, and the two of them saw it home. Nine fours in Kennett's 80; 36 of his runs struck to the boundary, and not a single one of them in the air over it. The worm bears out how tight the whole thing was: at thirty overs the two lines were within a couple of runs of each other, and they crossed and re-crossed through the last quarter before Binfield's climbed clear for good around the 43rd.

Both attacks were generous in the extras column - the runs a fielding side hands over in wides, no-balls and byes, added to the batting side's total. Wargrave's bowlers gave Binfield 25 of them, eleven in byes alone; Binfield's gave Wargrave 23. Wargrave's Adit Rajeev was the pick of their attack with 2 for 26 from ten miserly overs, and Finn Mercer's 2 for 36 kept the chase honest to the very end. Umpires Philip Hayfield and Michael Stone stood, Ken Clark and Paul Windsor kept the book, and everybody went home having watched a proper game of cricket. First-rate stuff.