CRICKET is such a great game because you never quite know what to expect.

I saw something the other week in our defeat against Woodhouses that I still can’t quite believe now.

Phil Heaton – Greenmount’s veteran captain – diving full length to catch a chance at first slip.

He must have dived about five foot and was in mid-air when he plucked the ball out of the sky with one hand.

Now I have never seen Phil dive for anything in his life. Generally, he would rather try to stop the ball with his foot and nine times out of 10 it goes for four.

Yet there he was, in full acrobatic mode, taking a worldie from our pro Kaustub Pawar’s bowling.

I was still laughing as I ran up to bowl. It was a moment I never expected to see, or expect to see again, and almost rescued the game for us.

Now if I thought that was surreal, I almost choked on my pint when I heard that Unsworth bowler Leighton Friend had taken seven wickets for seven runs from eight overs.

Those are figures you can only dream of. I have seen some pretty impressive spells of bowling in my time, people taking four wickets in an over, but those figures are just unreal.

That sort of thing is not supposed to happen in this standard of cricket. You hardly expect to see a bowler take 7-7 in under-10s.

It was particularly interesting for me as Greenmount are playing Unsworth in our penultimate match of the season, so I hope lightning does not strike twice.

It was the kind of performance I was not expecting to see after the league announced there would be no relegation from Division One. I was a bit annoyed by the timing of that announcement as I was worried about how teams like Unsworth and Worsley, who were battling against the drop, would react once the pressure was off.

I thought they could maybe take the foot off the gas and stop trying, which could skew results in the run-in.

Well that might have been the case for Worsley, I don’t know, but it certainly looks like Unsworth have got their mojo back.

It just goes to show that we will have to be on top of our game if we want to make it to our final match at second-placed Heywood with everything still to play for.

That is the scenario I am hoping for. I can’t think of a better way to end my career than with a showdown for the title.

What worries me is the opposite, that it will be a washout like last weekend and we end up securing the championship and promotion by default.

That could easily happen, but it’s not the way I want us to win it, I want to play.

I have been checking the long-term forecast, something all cricketers do, and it looks fine and dry for this weekend.

But I won’t be counting my chickens. If cricket has taught me one thing, it is to expect the unexpected.