I've no idea whether this will be of interest, but here goes anyway. My main team got off to a pretty lousy start, largely down to some very poor initial bowling picks. Saxelby mysteriously disappeared after a very promising pre-game start, Murtagh got injured after just one week, Joseph failed to live up to my expectations leaving only Masters performing anywhere near reasonably. So midway through week 3 it was time to ring the changes. In came Imran Tahir, Danish and Schofield; plus my next disaster - panicking over one bad week from Dalrymple and swapping him for Botha. Finally I changed my captain from van Jaarsveld to Trescothick. At the end of week 5 I looked at the century league and found it was in 101st position. Now if only it were week 10, but it made my mind up; I decided to leave things as they were and monitor the progress with a view to being well placed in division 2.

Over the next four weeks the team moved up to 92nd and I thought I'd blown it. Unbelievably it still contained the departed Kaneria and the dropped Hockley. Week 10 was dire and I found myself down to 97th on Saturday night just 34 points above 101st. The dream was still alive, so I took the ultimate gamble and dropped Trescothick and van Jaarsveld, replacing them with Trott and Peters. The logic was that both were in-form and next playing at the start of week 11 so it wouldn't be a complete waste of two transfers. Sunday night and joy of joys, down to 107th and 100 points behind 101st. Barring a miracle I was safe and could enjoy the Monday, or could I? There was only one thing worse than my four players excelling and propelling the team into division 1, and it happened. They managed a grand total of -4. When the points updated on Tuesday I was sat in 116th but if I hadn't made those two transfers I'd have been in ... yep, you've guessed it, 101st.

So that's the story up to the split. Stay tuned for the next instalment as the team tries to climb back to the summit of division 2.