No sooner had the first team reached the summit of Premier Two than they came crashing down to earth with a desperately poor performance against St. Ives on Saturday.

To be sure the team was missing six key players but there was no hint of the carnage to come when Peter Richer and Noah Thain opened up and progressed serenely to 32 in the first 8 overs. Richer as ever was severe on anything remotely off-line, whilst the 13-year-old Thain. the youngest ever debutant for the first team, was calmness personified. His departure triggered a mini-collapse in which skipper Alastair Cliffe edged behind to his first ball but Freddie Preston came in to add his usual mixture of enterprise and watchfulness.

At 78 for 3, with Richer having departed to a top-edged catch on the mid-wicket boundary, a recovery was well under way. Preston then lost his middle stump having essayed a pull-shot to ball that kept very low and the wheels promptly fell off the innings in quite alarming fashion, with Myers, Staley and Upton all having departed by the time the score had limped to 88. Australian Jack Quartermain attempted a re-build and included a flat batted six in his 17 but a final total of 116 all out looked to be nowhere near enough and criminally had left almost 20 overs unused.

Early wickets were required but were not forthcoming, as St.Ives' openers Jack Haycock and Jack Ranganathan, the latter a prominent member of the Thriplow junior set up, built a steady partnership, content in the knowledge that there was no immediate requirement to score with any haste. Skipper Alastair Cliffe rotated his bowlers at regular intervals in an increasingly desperate attempt to achieve a break-through and Quartermain especially beat the bat on numerous occasions but a wicket refused to fall and the opening alliance was three runs short of a hundred when bowler number seven, leg-spinner Peter Richer, trapped Haycock in front and palpably LBW for a very well-made 53.

St. Ives knocked off the remaining 20 runs without incident and Thriplow were left to contemplate an early finish, their first heavy defeat of a so far very satisfactory season and a return of precisely no points from a game in which they had been second-best in every department.