Five Things We Learned from Round 3

Damien Mortimer is back in the groove

Over the past five seasons, Sydney University’s Damien Mortimer has been one of the most consistent batsmen in First Grade, usually ending up with somewhere around a thousand runs to his name.  He had a minor blip in form last season, despite (or possibly because of) a successful off-season in Ireland, but normal service has now been resumed.  A former Australian under-19 captain, the compact right-hander always looks a high-class player, but has played less senior representative cricket than he might have, partly because although he passes fifty more often than anyone else, he has converted only eight of them into First Grade hundreds.  The most recent came on the first day of Round Three, a polished 122 against Easts at University Oval.   His innings showed all the hallmarks of the best of his batting – patience, impenetrable defence and sweet timing through the off side – besides which he set a new Premier Cricket record for Adjusting the Batting Gloves Between Deliveries.  He treated Marcus Attallah brutally in the off-spinner’s first spell.  Mortimer was eventually dismissed when he played for turn to a delivery from Attallah that skidded straight through, and a fine edge was held by keeper Harry Byrnes Howe.  Byrnes Howe isn’t the tidiest-looking keeper on the circuit: he wears his shin pads under his pants and his shirts are so large that you suspect that both Byrnes and Howe are hiding in there somewhere.  Byrnes Howe also opened the Easts innings, wearing his batting pads in the more conventional outside-the-trouser fashion, though he failed to get them or anything else behind a delivery from Ben Joy that nipped back and cartwheeled the off stump while the batsman shouldered arms.  Joy then trapped Baxter Holt in front first ball to reduce Easts to 3-35, at which point the target of 330 looked well out of reach.  There was a brief flurry from Tim Armstrong, who batted like a man with a train to catch, unfurling a series of meaty drives and slashes before deciding to attempt a defensive shot, and edging it.  Once Armstrong was dismissed, there were only two possible winners, and one of them was the rain which, as it happened, had the last word.

Tushaar Garg has settled in

Tushaar Garg is not your everyday opening bowler.  For one thing, he’s a former GPS public speaking champion, which means that there are only four or five Grade batsmen who have any chance of understanding his chat.  He’s also a law student and the founder of a not-for-profit organisation whose name - Ethical Education - invokes two concepts that are completely unfamiliar to the great majority of new ball bowlers.   Anyway, after eight seasons with Bankstown, Garg moved to Sutherland this season, filling a Tom Pinson shaped hole in the pace attack.  Being a reflective sort of character, he must have questioned the wisdom of the move after the first two matches of the season, in which his bowling was slaughtered mercilessly.  Gabriel Joseph and Nick Bertus plundered 71 runs from his 10 overs against Parramatta, after which he managed only one for 77 from 13 against his former club.  But Sutherland, and Garg, persisted, and they were rewarded with a remarkable spell of 6-35 against Campbelltown-Camden.  The Ghosts’ openers actually knocked up 35 runs in the first half hour, before Garg had Jayden Zahra-Smith caught at cover (Zahra-Smith has replaced Jaydyn Simmons in the side, complying with the competition By-Law that requires Campbelltown to field at least one Jayden or Jaydyn in every round).  That triggered a collapse in which five wickets fell for 13 runs.  Garg conceded 14 runs from his first three overs; then he grabbed 4 for 10 in 20 balls, including two with successive deliveries in his sixth over.  His pace isn’t alarming, but he bowled a very tidy off-stump line, found some awkward bounce, and did enough off the seam to trouble all the batsmen – a highly appropriate method for Glenn McGrath Oval.  He ended the innings with career-best figures and set up six points for Sutherland on the opening day of the game. 

SOK could break a few records this season

In case you’re wondering, the record for most wickets in a First Grade season by a Manly-Warringah player is 67.  Mark Cameron did that.  The record for most wickets in a First Grade season by a Manly-Warringah left-arm finger spinner who had previously represented NSW is the 66 Mike Pawley piled up in Manly’s premiership season of 1973-74.  Both numbers are under serious threat this season, depending on how deeply Steve O’Keefe’s T20 commitments impact upon his club commitments.  O’Keefe routed St George in the opening game, taking 6-36; in Round Two, he helped Manly to defend a sub-total of 142 by grabbing 5-16 from only eight overs.  There wasn’t a great deal of deceptive flight on show, as O’Keefe pushed the ball through quickly on a flat trajectory, but he has mastered the art of bowling round the wicket and straightening the ball just enough to find the outside edge – the result of which was that Penrith’s batsmen presented Cameron Merchant with three catches at slip.  In an interview he gave during the week, O’Keefe explained that he knows “how to manage my body to bowl 30 overs a day.  I’m glad my performances have shown that.”  Except, actually, they haven’t – he needed to bowl only 48 balls against Penrith.  Penrith would have been ecstatic if they’d stayed out there long enough to make him bowl 30 overs.  There may be longer spells ahead, but already O’Keefe has 13 wickets at an average of 7.  Quite apart from breaking records, he could very well propel Manly back into playing in the finals.

Michael Sullivan made a memorable start

Michael Sullivan played for eight seasons, and exactly 100 games, for Parramatta before he was called up to make his First Grade debut against Fairfield-Liverpool.  In truth, he had never mounted a very compelling case for earlier promotion: while he has turned out 33 times in Second Grade, the right-arm seamer managed only 34 wickets in those appearances.  He was graded in Seconds this season, after some penetrative spells in Thirds last year, but went wicketless in Round One.  In Round Two, though he celebrated his 100th game for his club by taking his first five-wicket haul – 5-69 against a UTS North Sydney team that hammered every other bowler.  That earned him a call-up to Firsts, where he made an instant impact, removing Yuvraj Sharma and Jaydyn Simmons in his opening spell.  He returned later in the day to wrap up the innings, finishing with the impressive figures of 5-33.  Rain cut short what would have been an interesting chase on the second day, but that wouldn’t have taken too much of the gloss from Sullivan’s debut.  Right now, he leads the bowling averages in the First Grade competition, 0.31 runs ahead of Steve O’Keefe.

St George bats deep in Seconds

For about an hour and a half, things were looking so good for the Blacktown Mounties.  Matt Day, their experienced Second Grade captain, had a careful look at the Harold Fraser pitch and decided it was lively enough to invite St George to bat.  His judgment was vindicated when the Saints collapsed to 5 for 56, with the sixth wicket falling only 16 runs later.  That brought together Max Farmer, a 17 year old wicket-keeper playing his second innings in Grade cricket, and Jono Craig-Dobson, a useful-ish lower order batsman whose highest score in 116 Premier Cricket matches was a 69 in Fourths.  That unlikely pair not only set about repairing the innings, but went on to rewrite the St George record book, adding 198 runs for the seventh wicket.  Farmer showed exceptional patience, batting for four and a half hours for his 105 and reaching his century with a neat cut past cover for three.  Craig-Dobson fell within a single stroke of his own maiden hundred, falling for 94 from 182 deliveries.  St George recovered to reach 297 and looked set to claim the points before rain intervened.  Farmer, a Maitland product, played with a level of maturity that suggests he could be a very interesting prospect.

Five Things We Learned from Round 2

Too many Ollies are never enough

What a big week for Cam Merchant, who celebrated (though possibly not in this order) not only an excellent innings of 89 against St George, full of deft cuts and glides, but also the arrival of his first child with Jules Robinson.  Five Things isn’t much of a follower of reality TV, watching – as a sort of professional duty – only just enough to keep up to date with the activities of the Manly Warringah Cricket Club.  But the story, as we understand it, is this.  Cam and Jules (Julie?  Julia?  Juliet?  anyway) met on Married at First Sight where, not grasping the format at all, they forgot to cheat on each other with a personal trainer/model before embarking on an alcohol-and-Twitter-fuelled rampage, but actually liked each other, and then got married at second sight.  Now, in a move that made the Daily Mail forget all about Donald Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis for a day or two, they have welcomed a son, Ollie.  And hearty congratulations to them.  But, Ollie?  We refuse to believe it’s a coincidence that the name was chosen in the week when Manly’s Ollie Davies followed his brutal Round One century with a run-a-ball 91 against St George.  This kind of tribute in entirely in keeping with the spirit of Grade cricket.  Although it’s sobering to think that had one of Merchant’s other team-mates been fit and in form, the kid might have been called Ahillen.  Bullet dodged.

The Students need a deep bench

Sydney University began its match against Gordon already missing Hayden Kerr, Devlin Malone (both injured) and Will Masojada (stranded in South Africa) and its stocks fell even further on the second day when Nick Larkin flew to Adelaide with the NSW squad and Liam Robertson injured his knee in the warm-up.  Yet the Students still had enough depth to account for a Gordon side depleted by several off-season departures.  Larkin’s 83 was the backbone of University’s 286, the one surprise about the innings being that he didn’t press on to the kind of massive score he so often accumulates when in control.  He received two short balls outside off in succession from Ash Premkumar; the first kept alarmingly low, but the second lifted, and Larkin chopped it onto his stumps.  You could argue that University should have posted a taller score after reaching 2 for 159, but Gordon’s spinners bowled with skill and persistence to keep their side in the game.  Gordon was well in the game on the second day, reaching 2 for 91 with Tym Crawford driving cleanly and confidently.  But Ben Joy and Dugald Holloway both defied the lifeless pitch to take wickets in clusters, and University’s new recruit, Nivethan Radhakrishnan, dismissed two batsmen with his right arm and one with his left.  For Gordon, left-hander Dylan Hunter delayed the inevitable with a fighting half-century.   It was a workmanlike win for the Students, who now could really use a week with no more injuries.

Michael Tudehope may have been the MVP

He wasn’t, of course – that was Matt Gilkes from University of NSW, who smashed his sixth First Grade hundred and carried it on to his first double hundred, a round 200 against Western Suburbs from only 203 balls.  Ten sixes, fifteen fours.  Brutal, and brilliant.  And yet (through no fault of his), not match-winning.  Because David Phillips isn’t a road, it’s a four-lane highway, and when the ball goes soft – say, around the fifth over – bowling becomes a cruel and unforgiving task.  The Bees’ bowlers found it difficult to exert any pressure on the second day, and Wests chased down their target of 368 with three wickets and a handful of deliveries to spare.  Nick Cutler’s 125 was excellent in the chase, and Josh Clarke (50), James Psarakis (58) and Joel Abraham (57) all made important contributions.  But you can make a cogent argument that the player who did most to win the game for Wests was seamer Michael Tudehope, who toiled through 22 overs on the first day to return the decidedly unglamorous analysis of one for 60.  In a match when 760 runs were scored at a rate of 4.65 an over, the gangly right-armer operated at an economy rate of 2.72.  We don’t usually think of economy rate as mattering much in two-day games, but if Tudehope had conceded runs at the same rate as the rest of the bowlers in the game, Wests would have had another 40-odd runs to chase, and that may have made all the difference.

Brock Larance enjoyed the week

The Grade Cricketer has always insisted that the most enjoyable feeling in cricket is scoring a hundred in a losing side.  If there’s a bowler’s equivalent, then Campbelltown-Camden’s indigenous all-rounder Brock Larance hit the jackpot last weekend.  Although the Ghosts fell 12 agonising runs short of Fairfield-Liverpool’s 256 in First Grade, Larance was outstanding, picking up 5-67 with his off-breaks, a haul that included State representatives Arjun Nair and Param Uppal as well as grizzled veteran Jarrad Burke.  On Sunday, Bankstown edged out the Ghosts in the first round of the Harry Solomons Little Bash, but Larance had another day to remember, dismissing Jake Cormack, Daniel Nicotra and Aaron Bird with successive deliveries.  The hat-trick ball was actually a low full toss, which a surprised Bird chipped straight back to the equally surprised bowler, who needed a couple of grabs to complete the catch.  Larance is not yet 19, but has already had a rather meandering journey along the cricket pathways: Campbelltown is his third Premier Club (he had Green Shield stints with Randwick-Petersham and Fairfield-Liverpool), and he has also played in Dubbo and Port Macquarie, toured England with the Australian Aboriginals and been a fixture in the NSW Country junior representative teams.  He made a tentative start to his First Grade career last season, but now looks set to make an impact.

NDs selectors are not easy to impress

And so to Second Grade, where Northern District Ranger Corey Miller hammered 262 against Hawkesbury from only 248 balls in just 259 minutes.  Some clubs might have responded to that performance by picking Miller in the T20 match on the next weekend but no, at NDs, promotions need to be earned.  And we do hear that Miller was a bit slow moving from 240 to 250.  Anyway, for those fascinated by Second Grade records (and who isn’t?) Miller’s innings was the highest at that level for NDs (beating 237 by the left-handed opener, Angus Farncomb) and the fifth-highest in Seconds for any club.  The record is still 278 not out, set in October 1904 by North Sydney’s ABS White against Manly (having dismissed Manly for 94, North Sydney then ran up the pointlessly massive total of 8 for 698, 21 of which came from the bat of future Test batsman Charles Macartney).  White, whose given names were Alfred Becher Stewart, was always known by his nickname, “Stud”, the origins of which thankfully remain obscure.  It may be some consolation to Miller to know that White made his first-class debut for New South Wales within twelve months of heaping misery on the Manly Twos. 

Five Things We Learned from Round 1

Dan Smith refuses to get old

For a time on Saturday, it looked as though the highlight of Sydney’s performance against Sydney University would be the debut of Kain Anderson, the teenaged Newcastle off-spinner.  But by the end of the day, the stand-out effort had come from a player who made his first appearance in First Grade (in March 1997) several years before Anderson’s parents even started getting to know each other (though this is, we admit, a guess).  Dan Smith came to the crease with the Tigers chasing a moderate target of 227, but in trouble after Ben Joy knocked the top off the innings with a lively opening spell.  He was a little tentative early on: footwork was never really his strongest point, and now he doesn’t bother with it much at all, preferring simply to lean his weight slightly forward or slightly back.  But his eye remains keen, and he strikes the ball almost as cleanly as ever.  His partnership with Ben Manenti took Sydney from 4 for 64 to 5 for 161, and Smith remained there until the end, unbeaten on 91 from 112, including three beefy sixes.  Anderson caught the eye with his control, variety and turn, and Ben Manenti bowled neatly and hit hard.  There were some promising signs for University (who missed the injured pair of Hayden Kerr and Devlin Malone): Charlie Dummer hit a bright half-century, his first in Firsts; Tim Cummins showed again why he’s among the best keeper-batsmen in the competition; and Ben Joy found awkward bounce that eluded the other quick bowlers.

It’s still a batsman’s game

In ten matches on Saturday, almost 5000 runs were scored while bowlers picked up only 137 of the 200 possible wickets, paying just over 35 runs for every one they took.  Those figures would have been even more one-sided if Mosman hadn’t surrendered its last eight wickets for 34 runs to last year’s Manly Second Grade attack.  We saw the first eight hundreds of the season as well as five scores in the 90s.  Parramatta’s Jacob Workman leaked 85 runs from 10 overs, and still ended up on the winning side.  It’s a good time of year to be a batsman.

Zeeshaan Ahmed looks interesting

Bankstown has developed a very interesting prospect in opening batsman Zeeshaan Ahmed, who fell three runs short of a maiden century in only his fifth First Grade innings on Saturday.  Ahmed has progressed through the junior ranks at Bankstown, playing Green Shield for three seasons, and turned out for NSW Metropolitan Under-19s last season, averaging a tick above fifty in the interstate carnival.  He turned the match against University of NSW into a one-sided affair by blasting 97 from only 77 balls as Bankstown ran down its modest target with 22.2 overs to spare.  On his way up through the grades, Ahmed showed an ability to bat for long periods of time, but he can also hit with power – he cleared the fence five times on Saturday.  One to watch.

Axel Cahlin enjoys a change of scenery

Axel Cahlin had been part of the furniture at Gordon for so long – he played eight years with the Stags – that it’s something of a surprise to realise that he’s still only 22.  His last two seasons in First Grade have been… OK, but without quite fulfilling the promise of his early years in the top grade.  Now he’s moved up the Pacific Highway to Waitara, and celebrated his first innings as a Northern District Ranger with an impressive century against Campbelltown-Camden.  His 122 came from 133 balls, with ten fours and a six, and helped NDs to a very defendable total of 6 for 267.  George Furrer and Chad Soper pegged back the Ghosts’ chase, despite Ben Patterson’s rapid 93.

Don’t expect much grass at Fairfield

Fairfield-Liverpool has assembled a remodeled side this year, led by new recruit Jarrad Burke, the 37 year old all-rounder who now has almost enough clubs for a few rounds at The Lakes.  Burke joins Param Uppal and Arjun Nair, giving the Lions three spinners who have represented NSW (Burke’s three appearances coming in the prehistoric T20 competition, when it was played between State teams).  Quick bowlers hoping for plenty of grass on the deck at Don Dawson Oval may well be disappointed this year.  Predictably, Burke was the pick of the attack against Randwick-Petersham, allowing only 31 runs from his ten overs.  His spell gave Fairfield a measure of control, despite Anthony Sams’ quickfire 107, before Daya Singh boosted his side with some clean striking at the back end of the innings, lashing 39 from only 16 deliveries.  Singh and the impressive Caelan Malady then each grabbed an early wicket, after which the chase was beyond Fairfield’s reach.  And there was time for Scott Coyte to pick up a wicket in his first appearance for Randwick-Petersham since March 2012.