Binfield Cricket Club's 5th XI won by seven wickets away at Chenies & Latimer CC on Saturday 15 August 2026, Zoë Docherty taking 7 wickets for 44 runs to bowl the hosts' 3rd XI out for 169 in a Thames Valley Cricket League (TVCL) Division 9D fixture before Evie Folwell's 57 and an unbeaten 28 from Ralph Weeks knocked off the runs inside 29 overs.

Seven wickets in an innings is a thing a cricketer may go a whole career without, and on Saturday afternoon in Buckinghamshire Zoë Docherty helped herself to seven for 44 - the last three of them in the final over, all for no addition to the score. My dear old things, what a way to finish a bowling spell.

Chenies & Latimer had chosen to bat and had every reason to feel reasonably placed. Matthew Potter and Rakesh Sugumar opened superbly for Binfield, eight overs for 23 and five for 17, four maidens between them from which not a run came, and the hosts were 18 for 2. But Supun Athukorale then played the innings of the match for them - 55 from 75 balls with eleven fours, four-fifths of his runs struck to the boundary - and his 85-run third-wicket stand with Sandeep Kumar (31) took the score to 103 and looked to have settled matters into a proper contest.

Docherty had other plans. She removed Athukorale, hit wicket, and Kam Patel for a duck inside the same over at 142, breaking a stand of 39 and turning a solid platform into a wobble; then, after Peter Henly had bowled Aayush Mehta at 169, she took the eighth, ninth and tenth without the scoreboard moving at all. Three wickets, no runs - and from 154 for 6 the last four wickets had yielded just fifteen between them. Her figures - 6.5 overs, 44 runs, seven wickets - are the sort you cut out and keep.

The chase was as untroubled as 170 has any right to be. Evie Folwell and Peter Henly opened with 91, more than half the target, Folwell's 57 spanning 81 balls with eight fours and Henly's 29 the steadiest of accompaniments. Folwell was third out, at 162, with the job all but done - and Ralph Weeks then finished the thing off in his own emphatic style: 28 not out from 23 balls, three fours and two sixes, 86 per cent of his runs in boundaries, the last of them a six off Chenies & Latimer's Jacob Henderson to win the match in the 29th over.

There was a good deal of generosity in the field on Saturday, and rather more of it from the hosts: Chenies & Latimer's bowlers gave Binfield 43 extras - the runs a fielding side hands over, added to the batting side's score - fully 29 of them in wides, which is better than a quarter of the 170 Binfield needed, arriving without a shot being played. Binfield's own attack had given away 34, thirteen of those in wides. A week after both sides had lost - Binfield narrowly to Slough, the hosts heavily to Chesham - this was a thoroughly emphatic answer. Goodness gracious me.