When club stalwart Adam Chinnery strode to the middle at the Mill Field on Sunday he probably put in the performance of the day from Sidbury Cricket Club.

This involved neither bat nor ball, but his ability to shift a recalcitrant roller which was stubbornly holding up play, coming to a standstill just short of a length on the designated strip.

Unfortunately, Chinnery’s club mates did not perform to the same high standard when play finally started as they were comfortably defeated by a good Newton Poppleford side.

Batting first, six of the visitors managed significant scores through some fine stroke play, the pick being K Clay (37) and T Moore (38). Barney Stone (two wickets) made an important breakthrough; Dave Munro-Higgs put in a tidy spell (2-27) which included an athletic catch off his own bowling, as well as a trademark one-hander from Ollie Paget; and ‘no-cake-again’ Josh Reed flighted the ball well to bowl out two men. However, the regular fall of wickets was not enough to slow the pace of the Newton Pop run accumulation.

Rob Bolton was busy in the field, and there were other moments of good play, but generally the standard of catching and fielding was a notch below the recent high standard of the Sidbury men. This contributed to a late acceleration by Newton Poppleford who managed to reach 216 for 8 from their 35 overs. Phil Grove and Chris FitzHenry were the other wicket-takers for Sidbury.

The somewhat daunting run chase got off to a reasonable start, despite losing the key wicket of Marcus Bennett early on, reaching 47-1 after 10 overs. Ben Pollard led the charge with another forthright innings, top scoring with 23 before sportingly walking after a faint edge behind was not detected by the umpire. Mark Williams had a life or two, but added a valuable 15 before his luck ran out, and debutant Phil Wallace batted well for his handy 16. Nevertheless, Sidbury were falling further behind the required run rate and it needed an injection of pace from the Middle order to get back into the game.

This was not to be as three good catches and a bizarre run out when a skied catch was dropped, for the addition of just five runs, almost ended the match as a competition.

In fact, such was the speed of the fall of wickets, Dave Munro-Higgs was in danger of being timed out, being not fully dressed, never mind padded up, when the preceding batsman was out.

The last pair of FitzHenry and Higgs hung around for a while, adding 20, but the now inevitable end came in the 29th over, still some 100 runs behind.

So, a well-deserved win for Newton Poppleford, leaving the Sidbury players hoping for a return to form in their next outing.