Derbyshire U15 girls traveled to Bourne CC to take on Lincolnshire in their next Royal London 40 over league fixture on Tuesday 13th June.
In complete contrast to the week before, summer had arrived for a glorious day at Bourne CC where Derbyshire skipper for the day, May Brown, won the toss and elected to field first.
Emily Ford and Grace Wolfenden opened the bowling for Derbyshire, with Emily striking first with some lovely bowling to make Lincolnshire 23-1 in the 3rd over. A top piece of fielding from vice-captain Freya Harper resulted in a runout before May Brown found the edge of their number 4 resulting in a smart catch from keeper Poppy Phillips.
Freya showed off her pace in an excellent spell of 1-11 off 5 overs before leg-spinner Charlotte Sisson started to trouble the Lincolnshire batters with a brilliant show of spin and bounce. Charlotte ended with tidy figures of 2-10 off 5 overs, and Grace Smith 2-9 off 4 really tied the innings up.
Left-arm swing bowler, Zoe Boucherat, took the final wicket of the match with her first ball leaving Lincolnshire seemingly short 98 all out in the 27th over.
Feeling confident, Derbyshire openers Erynn Crosby and Zoe Boucherat looked to get off to a good start. This wasn’t to be as Zoe fell in the 2nd over with the score on 1-1, which saw Freya Harper join Erynn and get stuck into the run chase.
Some good bowling from Lincolnshire saw Derbyshire struggle to make runs but Freya and Georgie Simpson (9) put on 30 runs before Georgie was caught with the score on 61-3. This started a collapse of the batting order, with Derbyshire falling to 74-7 when Freya made a good 40 runs before one popped up and took the top of the bat and being caught at midwicket.
It was down to Charlotte Sisson and the rest of the lower order to come up with a plan to score the remaining 29 runs needed to win. Charlotte partnered up with Grace Wolfenden to play some mature cricket to attempt to steady the ship before Charlotte fell for 9.
Derbyshire were only able to put on 3 more runs before being bowled out for 93, falling 5 runs short of the target.
A disappointing result for the Derbyshire girls after a positive morning with the ball, but lots of lessons to be taken from the day and areas for improvement going forward.
