July proved one of the tougher months of the season, for me, at least. I scored a paltry 57 runs in 8 innings, my average dropping from 16 to 12, the kind of drop it’s hard to truly recover from. After June’s back-to-back forties, I failed to reach 20 in July. My innings were as follows:

11-14-17-12-0-0-2-1

So, 25 innings in comparison:

2010 – 206
2011 – 295
2012 – 262

Obviously, it’s been a bad month, but perhaps statistics don’t tell the whole story, unless, of course, you have a whole lot of statistics. For Maresfield, my league side, I scored 14, 12, and 2. Apparently pretty damn poor. But, when you consider that these were out of totals of 102, 87, and 107 respectively, then it doesn’t look so bad. In fact, the 14 and 12 were the second highest scores in the Maresfield innings. Ok, the 2 at Hastings was shocking, but hey … it’s been on Sundays I’ve really failed to deliver.
The problem was a combination of dodgy wickets which gave puddings a bad name, some ahem, overly strong opposition, and a certain confusion of mine.
Ever since I discovered that I could bat right-handed again, I’ve been in a quandary, obsessed withgetting my eye in so that I can switch … this is all well and good but as soon as I started to feel comfortable, all I could think about was when … as the bowler trundled up, should I be going right-handed yet? Not helpful. Two innings spring to mind. Against Hastings I blocked out eight overs for two runs. Then I was bundled out. I needed to arrest the decline of the innings but that was crazy. At Sheffield Park, playing with the All Out Cricket chaps, I scored 1 run in 22 balls. This wasn’t helped by purposefully wide bowling designed to stifle the run rate, but hey.
I simply wasn’t taking control of my own destiny. I was letting the game dictate things. Rather foolish, frankly.
So, I decided that in August, things would be different. No, really, I did!