If your club missed the T20 finals, you’re a touch unlucky
So your club made it through to the finals of the T20 Little Bash? Well, that’s great – but so did eleven other clubs, which seems just a little bit excessive. The four pool winners – Campbelltown-Camden, UTS North Sydney, Parramatta and Northern District – go through to the quarter-finals, where they’ll play the winners of the four elimination finals played on 13 October. In those games, Sydney University plays Easts, Fairfield meets Wests, Penrith will play St George, and Bankstown faces Sutherland. It’s a touch surprising that teams as strong as Randwick-Petersham and Manly missed out, but early-season T20 is not a predictable game.
Josh Philippe is seeing it OK
Fresh from scoring a century in his first game for NSW, Josh Philippe added another hundred in his first game for Western Suburbs – the first time, we think, that this particular double has been achieved. Have you seen Philippe bat? If you pitch the ball up, he whacks it, and if you bowl short, he whacks it. You could try bowling a length, but then he whacks it. Chasing 149 against University of NSW, he shouldn’t really have had time to score a century, but he hit 110 not out from only 49 balls. In the first over, Aryan Patel kept him fairly quiet – he hit only two fours, and ten runs in all. But the third over, also bowled by Patel, went for 26, with Philippe launching the first ball, and each of the last three, over the boundary. He ended the game by blasting Tyler Grainger-Baldwin for the tenth six of his innings, giving Wests the points with a ridiculous 43 balls to spare. Incidentally, this is as good a place as any to express our deep disappointment that Blaize Irving-Holliday stopped playing for University of NSW before he had the chance to turn out alongside Tyler Grainger-Baldwin and Jack Hardwicke-Owen (but then, we are very easily amused).
Tim Cummins has been around
Sydney University’s second T20 match last Saturday was Tim Cummins’ 300th First Grade match, a rare milestone and one which serves as a handy reminder that he’s been one of Sydney’s best keeper-batsmen for some time now. Last weekend, his keeping was as sharp as ever (he both caught and stumped Blacktown’s Kunj Changela from the same delivery) and his calm leadership steered the inexperienced Students into the elimination finals. University seems to be short a reliable sixth bowler, which limits Cummins’ options in the field, but Kieran Tate showed his best white-ball form with a four-wicket burst against Blacktown, Dylan Hunter bats like a left-handed Josh Philippe, Damien Mortimer is in good touch, and newcomer Bailey Lidgard has shown a very handy ability to kick the score along in the closing overs.
One super over is unlucky, but two is ridiculous
We suspect that very few club sides bother practising specifically for a super over, because, be honest, how often is that going to happen? Well, only twice in two days, if you’re Randwick-Petersham. It worked out well enough on Saturday, when RPs and Gordon each managed 129 from their 20 overs. Angus McTaggart held Tym Crawford and Axel Cahlin to just eight runs, before Jack Wood launched Quincy Titterton for six to win the game with a ball to spare. On the Sunday, ridiculously, Randwick-Petersham tied again, despite drawing level with Northern District’s 164 with six wickets to spare and two balls remaining. At which point, Riley Ayre was run out attempting a match-winning single, and Alex Ross cracked Toby Gray’s final delivery straight to Lachlan Fisher. Gray kept the ball for the Super Over, conceding only seven runs, and Nikhil Chaudhary needed only two balls to settle the issues, hitting Ayre for two sixes. Northern District sailed through to the finals as pool winners, while Randwick-Petersham missed out. It can be a game of very fine margins.
The round’s silliest game was at North Sydney
The lower grade competition kicked off on Saturday, and the most irrational game of the round was in Second Grade at Bon Andrews Oval, where Bankstown collapsed to 9 for 114 against the home side. At which point, Koby Layton (who hit four 6s in his 66 not out) and Gurinderjeet Hara (57 not out) put together a rapid, unbroken last wicket stand of 136, more than doubling the score and allowing Bankstown to post a more-or-less par total of 9 for 250. That looked distinctly useful when North Sydney lost its first five wickets for only 126 runs, with Hara (5-40) completing a memorable double. But North Sydney’s lower order fought hard, and the game was settled by the other last-wicket pair: Jack Atkinson hit the match-winning boundary with only two balls left in the game.