KL report - Bat and Ball 1996 (Cup) - 11th May - Lost 2-3

From Phil
On Wednesday evening the Natives of Whitstable ventured west to Gravesend, nestling in the lap of the river Thames, for their Kent League Cup match against the petanque players of the Bat & Ball pub on Wrotham Road. This pub is situated adjacent to the cricket ground and, as such, Natives may well be familiar with it from their days playing with a different kind of ball:

We entered through the door on the left and found an expansive, open-plan bar area, sparsely furnished and largely characterised by that style of decoration that can only be described as "plain." The room is dominated by a central pillar, to which is affixed a dartboard and a large sign that says, "One Team, One Spirit, One Win," which more or less tells us what this pub is all about - it's a place where they play sport and they take it seriously. If their 1996 petanque team is anything to go by, however, they will willingly mix business with pleasure.

We found them at the rear and, although we had arrived early in order to put in some practice on their unfamiliar piste, they were already warming up in a well drilled manner. Bat & Ball 1996 are a Kent League division one outfit, who named themselves after the year in which they moved to this venue from the Battle of Britain pub, where they had been founded in the distance past of the 1980s. Some of their current team are survivors from that time. They were all smartly kitted out, and the logo on their sweatshirts, consisting of a vampire bat flying over a boule, was fairly impressive but not a 'patch' on that of the Natives, which is deserving of a major design award. In fact, I'd be very surprised if any team in Kent can rival the Natives in the sartorial stakes. The playing of petanque stakes, of course, is a different matter!

The piste at the Bat & Ball is similar to that at the Northwood Club: mud covered with pea shingle. The difference in this case is that the layer of shingle is somewhat on the scant side and the mud is more compact, so boules bounce more readily. This may be because it's predominantly London clay rather than the chalk found in Thanet. Whatever the reason, this was bad news for the shooters, who found that any shots not "bang on" bounced over their targets like Barnes Wallis bombs. The Bat & Ball team seemed to have found the answer to this problem by lining up with a set of specially designed boules:

However, these boules were deemed to be outside the regulation size for competition play so they were instructed put them away and not to be so silly in the future.  

All of which is a preamble to the fact that there is nothing particularly good to report about the Natives' performances in the triples. These were played first and saw skipper Alan, Robert and Chris playing in one game, while Peter, Duncan and Phil were involved in the other. The Natives made progress in both games but were unable to convert either of them into a win. The one in which I played reminded me of this timeless lyric from an Elvis song in the film GI Blues: "Didja' ever get one of them days / When nothin' is right from mornin' till night?" Well, "nothin'" went right for the Natives in this game. We saw the opposition unintentionally pick up the coche on the last boule of the end and leave it at the back of the piste for a score of three. Many times we were mere millimetres on the wrong side of perfection or points went west due to the rub of the gravel. And to cap it all, yours truly managed to disturb the head just enough to convert a scoring position for us into a point for them with the last boule of an end. We lost 13-7.

So we were very much on the back-foot when it came to the doubles games and we now needed to win all three for victory in the match. This proved to be too tough a task against a team of this calibre but the Natives never give up and they always make it as hard as possible for any team who wants to end up with a win. Duncan and Phil played together for the first time since Noah left the Mesopotamia School of Carpentry and, considering we'd just cocked-up the triples, we played rather well. Suddenly the pointing was in the groove and the shooting was highly successful and we managed to match the skill levels of our opponents. In fact, we were able to keep out noses in front throughout the game and emerged with a 13-9 win.

At last there was one on the board for the Natives but, unfortunately, Alan and Robert came up against a very fine pair of players who had an intimate knowledge of the terrain and were clearly the absolute bankers for their team. The Natives lost 13-8 but theirs is no disgrace, as John Anderson would have said, and in fact the Natives played with great resolve throughout the doubles. None more so than Peter and Chris who played with verve and backbone and brought overall respectability to the score by winning a highly entertaining game 13-11. 

So the Natives' exploits in the Kent League Cup came to a grave end in Gravesend and there will be no Plate entry because this was the second round. We consoled ourselves by tucking into an excellent post-match chicken biryani, which we ate sitting companionably beside our hosts, who had been both fair-minded and congenial throughout our encounter and are a credit to the wider petanque community, within which the Natives Petanque Club can have a highly promising future, if it so desires.