Photo © ECC

Six teams - Munich, Winterthur, Prague, Ljubljana, Utrecht and Lodi - from six different countries - Germany, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Holland and Italy ñ were due to travel to the ground of the Idle Cricket Club outside Lodi for the 7th annual "Golden Duck" 8 a-side tournament. Too good to be true? Alas, yes. A fortnight before the Utrecht Cricket Club pulled out. The gap was plugged by a volunteer team - the Mango Pickers (?!) - put together by the Idle club members and all remained on course until the Friday afternoon, just a handful of hours before the start, when the Slovenes of Ljubljana sent an e-mail withdrawing also. Difficult in such circumstances to pull everything together and reshape the tournament. Bravo then to Paolo, Rob, Carlo, Vittorio, Gio, Tomi, and the others who worked so hard to make the tournament work.

And so to the tournament itself. On a steamy hot weekend with only the evening menace of distant storms to disturb the clear blue skies and temperatures consistently nearer thirty-five than thirty in the shade, a five-team tournament saw two teams - the Munich Cricket Club and the Idle Cricket Club of Lodi - win their two opening matches to move through directly into the Sunday afternoon final, while the Winterthur club, despite the size and undoubted quality of their band of loyal supporters, and the local `Mango Pickers' group, lost both their opening games and would thus contest the opening match on the Sunday morning. This left Prague, with one win and one defeat, to await the result of the first game to see who they would play in an eventual play-off for third and fourth places.

Sunday morning and it was back to the distant pavilion with the generator humming in the background to feed the fridge, the shower pump and the brand-new cool water dispenser. Baskets of fruit on the table, and gazebo awnings spread around the boundary. Winterthur did for the Mango Pickers but were no match for Prague, for whom Scottie Page was rightfully nominated `man of the tournament'. And so to the final. Could the Lodi batting, shorn of their two Sri Lankans (Keerty working and Nazeer at the hospital with his wife and four day old boy) cope with the challenge? In the event the answer was a resounding `no' and after the tight and tense struggle which restricted their opponents to less than a hundred from the available twelve overs, the Lodi innings collapsed to leave the Munich Cricket Club easy winners of the 7th edition of the Golden Duck Tournament, successors to the Cabris Club.