Devlin Malone won the clash of the nerds
It was always going to be Devlin Malone’s day, after his very first delivery – full and flighted – collected Ethan Jamieson on the pad and won an lbw decision. The pitch at Sydney University was slow, but Malone managed to turn the occasional ball a very long way, and he totally deceived Brandon McLean with a wrong ‘un that rattled into the off stump without the batsman offering a shot. The Sydney University leg-spinner was the leading wicket-taker in First Grade last season, and his 6-42 against University of NSW gave him eight wickets from the first two days of 2022-23. He was well backed up by Caelan Maladay, who bowled an excellent fourth stump line and worried every batsman. University of NSW struggled to 163, and then Nick Larkin gave Sydney a rapid start, latching onto anything short and cracking 45 from only 53 deliveries. Sydney University was superbly placed at 1 for 82, before rain washed out the whole of the second day.
La Nina was the Round Two MVP
Of the fifty games played across the five grades in Round Two, only three produced results. St George grabbed six points in Seconds after stalwart Andrew Walsh (4-30) and leggie Joshua Moors skittled Bankstown for only 95. Randwick-Petersham Fourths knocked off the Ghosts thanks to some excellent new ball bowling by Thomas Gibson (5-15) and senior citizen Nigel Singh. And in Fifth Grade, Fairfield-Liverpool’s Zeel Nizama steered his side to victory over Sutherland with 61 not out. No-one else managed a result: 26 matches never started at all.
Cricket has never figured out a way to deal with the inherent unfairness caused when one team gets a chance to play and another doesn’t. It’s always shrugged off as “the luck of the game”, but perhaps that’s just an excuse for lazy thinking. Offhand, we can’t think of any other sporting league that tolerates a situation that allows some teams to collect competition points while others don’t even make it onto the field. Finding the answer is the hard part. Reintroducing bonus points might help a little: at least that would give some reward to a team that hammers its opposition in the limited time it has to play. Or, more radically, competition points might be awarded only in a round in which (say) half the teams in the grade manage to play for a certain minimum amount of time (80 overs, for example). That might sound artificial and arbitrary, but can you imagine anyone tolerating a situation in which the Panthers reach the NRL finals because they got to play the Bulldogs on a day when the Roosters were “washed out” against the Tigers? No sport accepts this as a sane outcome. Except cricket.
Blacktown has a bit crazy man
It was a pity that rain brought a premature end to a fascinating battle of the northwest: Hawkesbury had its nose in front, as Blacktown needed 71 runs to win with only three wickets standing. Still, one of those wickets belonged to Smit Raval, so anything might have happened. Raval had already worked his way through the Hawkesbury innings, taking 7-66 with his leg-breaks, and he has a lot going on. He started out as a pace bowler in Gujarat, but by the time he moved to Sydney on a tourist visa, injuries had forced him to take up slow bowling. According to his social media profiles, he's a professional cricketer, ICC coach, “fitness coach for modelling agencies”, “philanthropist” and a ”bit crazy man I am”. Unfortunately the rain prevented us from discovering whether he could add “match-winning lower order batsman” to what is, already, a formidable list of credentials.
That man’s following me…
Last season, in Round Two, the highest scorer in First grade was Sutherland’s Jarryd Biviano, with 172 against Hawkesbury – just ahead of Justin Avendano, who smashed 171 (with 11 sixes) for North Sydney against Gordon. The highest scorer in First Grade in Round Two last week was… Jarryd Biviano (with 153 against Fairfield), just one run ahead of… Justin Avendano, who hit 152 for North Sydney against Sydney. Sutherland and North Sydney both built impressive first-innings totals, without having time, before the rain, to force a win.
We don’t know what the “HQ” bit means, but it’s not “High Quality”
So, as far as we can tell, someone at Cricket Australia decided that the MyCricket platform provided large amounts of information more or less instantaneously, and decided it was time to put a stop to it. This season, if you want to track down live Grade cricket scores online, you need to find something called “PlayHQ”. Which has about 8% of the information that was on MyCricket, but makes up for that by giving it to you much, much more slowly. In Round 1, we decided to be charitable, and put it down to teething trouble – which was fair enough because, you know, who could have predicted that Grade cricket would start on the last weekend in September? But this last round it’s become obvious that PlayHQ just isn’t up to the job. If you’re lucky, it uploads innings totals as the match unfolds, but that’s about it, unless you access it through the MyCricket app. It doesn’t update scorecards; it doesn’t integrate with live streaming platforms. In a two-day game, it gives you innings details more slowly than you used to get them when they were printed in the Sunday papers, and at the time of writing, PlayHQ still insists that someone called ******* took 7-66 for Blacktown in the last round. Putting Grade cricket on this system, in its current state, isn’t quite the same as hiding it under a rock, but it’s not far off.