Five Things We Learned from Round 7

Will Salzmann made a breakthrough

In his handful of Marsh Cup games for NSW so far, Will Salzmann has played as a bowler who can bat a bit.  That could be about to change.  In the match between Sydney University and St George, which featured five batsmen with first-class experience, he played the standout innings, doubling his previous best score in First Grade to post a highly impressive maiden century.  Salzmann went in with University deep in trouble at 2-15, chasing 307, to face Peter Francis with his tail up.  He got off the mark with an uppish cover drive for 2, then middled the next ball to the cover fence.  He welcomed Luke Bartier into the attack with two successive boundaries, and a couple of overs later cracked the same bowler high over wide mid off for a ridiculously effortless 6.  His driving was a feature of his innings, but he showed deft touch in glancing Francis for two fours in succession, and launched leg-spinner Joshua Moors for a massive 6 over long-on.  While Salzmann was batting with Tim Cummins, University looked on track to reach its target, but the stand was broken by a run out, after which the consistently excellent Francis settled the issue.  The hard-fought win gave St George its sixth victory from as many games, and they remain on top of the competition table.

Alex Lee-Young has started well

Mosman has had a patchy season so far, but was too strong for University of NSW last weekend and will take great encouragement from the form of 16 year-old debutant, Alex Lee-Young.  Picked to keep wicket, Lee-Young found himself going into bat earlier than expected after a spectacular collapse.  Openers Nick Browne and Stirling McEvoy had added 52 runs when Sanjit Selverajoo knocked back Browne’s off stump, and then everything fell to pieces.  Hayden McLean bowled Tom Colgan with the last ball before lunch; then, in the first over after the break, Shehan Sinnetamby played a ball to square leg, both batsmen ran, both batsmen stopped, and Peter Forrest was run out without facing a ball.  5 for 68.  But Lee-Young drove the third ball he faced down the ground for 4 and settled in to play a highly mature innings, reaching 64 from 160 balls.  A harsh critic might complain that, at the moment, his game is a bit block-or-four, but he has plenty of time to figure out how to nurdle the ball around for ones and twos.  He certainly dealt impressively with anything loose, finding the boundary ten times.  To cap off a memorable debut, he snared four victims behind the stumps as the Whales recovered to win comfortably.

They still bowl leg spin in England, a bit

Here's something you don’t see every day – a low-scoring game at Benson Lane, decided by an English leg-spinner.  Easts batted first and struggled to reach 166 after Will Simpson worked hard for his 50.  Hawkesbury was easing towards victory at 1 for 41 when Cameron Steel, an all-rounder from Surrey, came on.  Jarod Brett offered no stroke to Steel’s first delivery, apparently expecting it to turn, and that was a mistake.  Jack James tried to pull a short ball away, and mistimed an easy catch to Daniel Hughes.  Steel had 3-5 shortly afterwards, when he removed Connor Mizzi, and Hawkesbury never really recovered.  Steel hurries to the crease, usually pushes the ball through quickly, and doesn’t seem to generate a lot of sidespin, but he was immensely accurate and, every now and then, allowed the ball a little more air.  It was that slower ball that accounted for Ryan Mizzi, who aimed a wild swipe in the direction of midwicket and only succeeded in skying it to cover.  Steel ended up with 5-28, and Easts ran out winners by 35 runs. 

Every run counts

Some days you get sent in to bat on a lively pitch at Cook Park, and things don’t go your way.  But do you give up?  No.  Because even if you just scrape together a few more runs, it could make a difference.  Usually, actually, it doesn't.  But on Saturday, Penrith Third Grade was 9 for 71 in the 21st over when Cooper McLean joined Lachlan Cash, and the two of them dragged out the innings for another 14 overs – and 47 runs.  Cash finished not out on 52, while Cooper nudged his way to 12.  Still, 118 wasn’t much of a total, and Campbelltown looked well placed at 5 for 80, only for William Hicks (6-21) to bowl his side to victory by 11 runs.  So the lesson is, don’t give up.  But maybe the lesson is, don’t throw runs away.  The two sides managed 225 runs between them in two innings, but there were no fewer than 47 sundries in there, including a truly absurd 32 wides.  Either side could have won the game easily just by refusing to donate unearned runs to the other. 

Sydney University Women had a breakthrough

It’s been a frustrating few weeks for the Sydney University Women’s Firsts, who are playing their first season in Women’s Premier Cricket (although many of the players turned out for the defunct Universities club).  They pushed St George-Sutherland down to the wire, only to lose by one wicket after a last-wicket partnership knocked off the last 12 runs.  Then they lost to Bankstown, who passed their target on the last possible ball of a T20 game.  After those near misses, they finally notched their first win of the season, against Parramatta – and by the comfortable margin of 60 runs.  The highly consistent Jess Davidson hit 54 in rapid time, Carly Leeson played brightly for 40, and there were handy contributions form Sarah Brine and Chaye Hartwell.  Vaishnavi Deobhankar, Sarah Brine and Frankie Nicklin (celebrating her selection in the NSW Metropolitan Under 19s) finished the job with the ball.  Perhaps the match of the round, though, was the clash between Manly and Sydney – batting first, Manly reached 5-238, but Sydney fell just ten runs short, with Jodie Hicks hitting an excellent 98.

Five Things We Learned from Round 6

First day points are gold

In a cricket competition, rain distorts everything, because there are no points for moral victories or commanding positions.  Half of the First Grade matches in Round Six ended in draws, and not all that many of them were evenly balanced.  A side that’s good enough to earn points on day one, when day two is impacted by rain, earns itself a massive advantage.  The lively Michael Sullivan gave Parramatta exactly that advantage after Nick Bertus invited UTS North Sydney to bat first at Old Kings Oval.  Sullivan grabbed an early breakthrough when he removed Tim Reynolds, who somehow managed to edge a shoulder-high delivery he was trying to leave.  Evan Pitt lured the dangerous Justin Avendano into a loose waft outside off stump, and then Sullivan cut through the middle order, sparking a collapse in which four wickets fell for four runs.  Sullivan finished with 6-33, the Bears made only 75, and Parramatta cruised past that total with only three wickets down.  Actually, first innings scoresheets look remarkably lopsided, because in Parramatta’s innings, only Andrew Calvert passed nine – but he made up for the rest with an unbeaten 103.  Parramatta might have been able to chase outright points – but you already know what happened on day two.

Charlie Anderson looks useful

Northern District’s opening bowler, Charlie Anderson, has been on the radar for a while now, having been in the representative pathways for some years (and holding a Basil Sellers scholarship).  But he has never made quite the impact on First Grade that he did in Round 6, slicing through Western Suburbs to give Northern District full points at Pratten Park.  Watching NDs bowl at Pratten was like a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s, when the pitch favoured seam bowlers to an almost ridiculous extent.  In between rain delays, Anderson, who’s nippy rather than fast, exploited the conditions perfectly, bowling an excellent line on or outside off, and moving the ball off the seam.  He jagged a ball back in to Josh Clarke to win an lbw decision, and deceived Finn Gray with a slower ball which was patted to David Lowery at cover.  James Psarakis nicked one through to the keeper, Farhan Zakhail fended a lifting ball to short leg and, with Wests reeling at 5 for 19, Anderson had all five wickets for ten runs.  Lachlan Fisher spoiled the sequence by taking the next two wickets, but Anderson finished a memorable day with 7-33.  He’s the latest fast-bowler to emerge from Knox Grammar, which has also produced Richard Stobo, Matt Nicholson and Harry Conway.

The Students got all wet for nothing

Sydney University can probably count itself the unluckiest side in Round 6, having thoroughly outplayed Eastern Suburbs, only to leave Waverley Oval empty-handed.  The Students ran up 8 for 345 on the first day, then reduced the powerful Easts batting lineup to 3 for 19, and then watched the rain fall.  A win would have vaulted the Students into the top six; the draw leaves them outside looking in.  Highlights were Jack Attenborough’s return to his best form, after a rocky start to the season, another fine innings from the very consistent Tim Cummins, and a polished effort from Ryan McElduff.  McElduff remains the batsman in Sydney most likely to score an impressive fifty without reaching a hundred: he has a well-organised defence and strokes all round the wicket, and has often contributed attractive runs at important times, but is still waiting for his first hundred in the top grade.  Partly this is because he’s now batting in the middle order, which gives him limited time, and partly it’s because he plays unselfishly – he played beautifully for 76 against Easts, before falling when trying to force the pace against Marcus Atallah’s off spin.

Blake Smith bowls straight

All-rounder Blake Smith has hit a rich vein of form for Campbelltown-Camden.  In Round 5, he hit 80 against Mosman and followed that with 5-42; in Round 6, he cut through Sydney with 5-30 and then hit 60.  Smith bowls off-breaks from an extremely short approach (too short to be called a run), and they don’t turn or dip all that sharply, but they are certainly accurate.  He earned his rewards for attacking the stumps against Sydney, winning four lbw decisions.  His runs are usually scored in a hurry – his 60 against Sydney came from only 59 balls.  His progress this season will be interesting to watch.

Stephen Wark got slogged

So Stephen Wark opened the bowling for St George Fourths against Manly, and his bowling was flogged.  Jack Melchiore hit him for two fours in an over; his four overs cost 22 runs.  Fourth Grade batsmen don’t often treat him with that level of disrespect.

Unfortunately for Manly, that was the second innings.  In the first innings, Wark bowled 17.2 overs, unchanged, and took 8-17.  Manly were 24 without loss when Wark took the ball: they managed a total of just 87, to which Melchiore contributed exactly 50.  Wark is not your average 53-year old cricketer: his inswinging mediums still befuddle most lower grade batsmen and, while his pace may have dropped over the years, his control hasn’t.  So far this season, he has collected his 850th wicket for St George (behind only Ross Longbottom) and his 300th wicket in Fourth Grade.  On this form, there are plenty more to come.

Five Things We Learned from Round 5

Hunar Verma is settling in

It’s not unfair to say that Hunar Verma made a slowish start to the season with his new club, Sydney University – the combination of a heap of T20 games and some unresponsive pitches didn’t help, and he snared only six wickets in his first eight matches.  That seems like a long time ago now – in his last two games, he’s followed a career-best effort with the bat (53 against Fairfield) with a match-winning, career best 5-34 against Wests.  It was a good day for seamers all over Sydney and Verma, bowling a slightly fuller length than usual, took expert advantage of the conditions after Damien Mortimer invited Wests to bat first.  Arnav Raina offered no shot at a ball that jagged back enough to clip off stump; the Afghan batsman, Farhan Zakhail, slapped a drive to Ryan McElduff at cover; Tom Brooks was bowled all over the place, Jack Bermingham sliced a drive to Kieran Tate and Jordan Gauci, at slip, held a juggling catch above his head to remove debutant Mitchell Fleming.  It was a fair reward for Verma’s intelligent use of the conditions and it set University a relatively straightforward chase on the second day.

Batting was far easier on the second day, when Hayden Kerr (68) steered University to a comfortable win.  The puzzle on the second day was whether Tom Brooks had a good day, or not.  Wests’ burly leg-spinner bowled unchanged for nearly 30 overs and captured a career-best eight wickets.  He collected the big scalps of Nick Larkin (drawn into a forward defensive push and held by Josh Clarke at slip), Jack Attenborough (who played around a full, high-flighted delivery) and Kerr (who cracked Brooks high over mid-wicket for six, but then edged his next attempt at that stroke to slip).  So… pretty good?  Except that Brooks also leaked almost five runs an over, conceding 144 in all.  He has good variety and gives the ball a rip, but at the moment his wicket-taking balls are punctuated by too many short balls outside off stump.  Still, he’s an obvious talent and, with a few more runs to play with, should win his side a few games before the season ends.

It could do a bit early

With heavy skies and greener pitches, day one of Round 5 was a good one for the quicker bowlers all over Sydney, but nowhere more dramatically than Chatswood Oval.  Yes, Chatswood Oval, the place where (we insisted last week), partially-sighted elderly batsmen usually have no trouble scoring runs.  This week the pitch was damp and two-paced, and Gordon sent University of NSW in after winning the toss.  Play began sedately enough, until Nick Toohey’s fifth delivery reared from a length, and William Wolter could only glove it to Joey Gillard at fourth slip.  Ethan Jamieson wafted a boundary to third man, then missed a full, straight ball from Toohey that rattled his off stump.  Callum Bladen got in on the act in his fourth over, finding Tom Scoble’s outside edge with his first delivery, and then removing Annay Chauhan first ball, with Jamie Bekis holding another catch.  The pitch really didn’t do much that was alarming – it just tended not to do the same thing for two balls in succession, with a bit of sideways movement, and the pace and bounce a little unpredictable.  Usually in this situation, someone eventually hangs around and makes a few runs, but not this time.  Suffan Hassan and Tyler Grainger-Balding each made 9, but the Bees were bundled out for 38 in the 19th over, Bladen taking 5-14 and Mitchell Lole chipping in with 3-5.  Gordon limped over the line to claim first innings points on day one, ending up at 5 for 44.  The second day was something of an anticlimax, as the Bees warded off outright defeat without doing so quite fast enough to set up an interesting fourth innings.

Sydney produced the upset of the round

It has been a rough season so far for the Tigers, who have been forced to rebuild their First Grade side from scratch after a wholesale exodus of players in the off-season.  So it was a major boost for a team of unknowns to upset Bankstown at Drummoyne last weekend.  Sydney had the worst of the conditions, too, battling to a first innings total of 242 mostly through the efforts of young Murrumbidgee wicket-keeper Hayden Forner (59) and seam bowler Charlie Howard (40), who have a mere handful of First Grade matches between them.  But the critical blow was struck by opening bowler Cian Egerton.  Egerton has something of a laboured run-up – he looks a bit like a man wading through wet cement on his way to the crease – but his first ball to Daniel Solway bounced from a good length, took the shoulder of the bat and was comfortably held by Nathan Doyle at second slip.  Off-spinner Kain Anderson picked up four wickets, and Sydney took a morale-boosting win by the surprisingly large margin of 105 runs.

The British are coming

For most grade cricketers, the longest journey you’re asked to undertake in order to do nothing in a game of cricket is the trek out to Hawkesbury.  Ed Pollock has just travelled 17,000 kilometres for a taste of that quintessential grade cricket experience.  It’s that time of year again, when pale-faced northerners descend from the skies and take up their places in Sydney’s Premier Cricket sides.  Pollock, a dynamic left-handed batsman from Worcestershire, had a perfect initiation to the vagaries of grade cricket, as he fielded through North Sydney’s innings on day one, and then spent the second day of his debut watching Blake Nikitaras, the inevitable Blake Macdonald, and Kurtis Patterson knock off the required runs.  Five Things is still awaiting reports on Pollock’s cordial-mixing skills.  George Bell, a Lancashire wicket-keeper/batsman who also bowls off-breaks, has joined Bankstown, and at least got a bat, playing crisply for 35 against Sydney.  Bell wouldn’t look out of place in a Green Shield team, and has played England Under-19s, but is actually now 21.  Cameron Steel, a Surrey all-rounder, made a quiet start for Easts against Parramatta, scoring 23 and taking a single expensive wicket with his leg-breaks.  And Sydney University has a keeper-batsman from Hampshire, who hasn’t yet played first-class cricket, but makes up for it with an absolutely first-class name – Wilf la Fontaine-Jackson.

Forget the spelling, it's pronounced “Keeva”

It was a weekend of landmarks in the Brewer Shield (Women’s Under-18s), with new ground being broken by both Sydney University and Greater Hunter Coast.  Sydney University, after a difficult start to its first season in the competition, broke through for its first victory, comprehensively outplaying Blacktown.  University produced a remarkable bowling performance, using eleven bowlers in dismissing Blacktown for only 87.  Blacktown actually reached 1 for 45 before flighty spinner Tanisha Shanmuganathan (2-7) and accurate medium-pacers Ruby Carter (3-7) and Marie Lagane (2-3) cut through the middle order.  University reached its target with few alarms.  A much tougher chase was set by Gordon, who must have felt pretty comfortable after posting 4 for 190 from their 50 overs at Cahill Oval.  But Greater Hunter Coast stormed home with 15 overs to spare, mostly through Caoimhe Bray, who hammered an unbeaten 106 from only 111 balls – the first century ever recorded for her club in the competition.  Bray averages 65 in Brewer Shield this season, hits plenty of boundaries, and scores her runs very quickly.  She has already played for NSW Country at Under-19 level, and has a very bright future in the game – unless she decides to concentrate on soccer, since she’s also in the Newcastle Jets system as a goalkeeper, which gives her an Ellyse Perry-shaped problem in a few years’ time.

Five Things We Learned from Round 4

Tim Cummins is seeing it OK

Tim Cummins isn’t keeping wicket for Sydney University just now, while he recovers from recent eye surgery.  He’s still seeing the ball well enough, though, as he’s made his best start to the season with the bat for a few years.  University lost two very early wickets against Fairfield, but a bright stand between Damien Mortimer and Ryan McElduff had steadied the innings.  Cummins went to the crease when Mortimer, who made a fluent 49, nicked the first ball of the second session.  Cummins was quickly in stride, driving Jaydyn Simmons past cover for 4, then using his feet well to attack left-arm spinner Cameron Frendo.  Frendo, an Australian Under-19 representative, is certainly a promising talent, but at the moment his length is a touch mechanical, and Cummins went deep into his crease to cut and pull deliveries that were barely fractionally short.  Then he turned his attention to Yuva Nishchay, punching a full toss past point and steering the next ball, an even higher full toss, to third man for successive boundaries.  He needed only 54 balls to reach fifty, cracking Frendo square to the off side fence.  His progress was slower in the final session, but he moved to 99 by pulling a long hop from Yuvraj Sharma for 6, before reaching his fifth First grade hundred by tapping the same bowler past mid-on for a single.  University’s tail wagged, Hunar Verma reaching a maiden fifty, and those extra runs proved vital as Fairfield reached 9 for 310 by the end of the second day, just 31 short.  There was a colossal appeal for a catch behind from Verma’s bowling in the 95th over of the second day, but the decision went Fairfield’s way and the game ended in a draw.

And then there were two…

Sunday’s two semi-finals in the Kingsgrove Sports T20 competition produced one predictable outcome and one slight upset.  It’s no disrespect to Fairfield to say that Randwick-Petersham were strong favourites to win at home, and they stomped home by 54 runs.  It might have been closer: Liam Hartcher and Josh Baraba actually took three wickets in the first four overs, but by that time the score was already 49, Jack Wood having whacked 34 from only 12 balls.  He hit the first ball he faced over mid-on for 4, then climbed into Connor McKerr, thumping his first two deliveries down the ground for 4 and 6 before launching another 6 over cover and swiping the last ball of the over through wide mid-on for 4 more.  Actually, Fairfield fought back well to reduce the home side to 6 for 103 in the 13th over before this year’s Irishman, Jake Egan, took control of the back of the innings.  82 runs came from the last six overs, with Egan carving 61 from 28, with five 6s.  Egan took 13 balls to reach 16, but the 38 runs he plundered from the last two overs, with some remarkably clean striking and some meaty pulls against Hartcher, put the game beyond Fairfield’s reach.  Fairfield’s one chance of victory was a flying start from Jaydyn Simmons and Nick Carruthers, but Riley Ayre ended that prospect with a suffocating early spell.

At Howell, Gordon’s 4 for 140 was no better than par against opponents like Ryan Gibson and Tyran Liddiard, but highly disciplined bowling, especially from orthodox left-armer Matthew Wright and Nick Toohey, restricted Penrith to just 8 for 104 to win by an unexpectedly comfortable margin.  So it’s Gordon and Randwick-Petersham in next week’s grand final.

Runs and more runs at Batswood Oval

If you’re a batsman and you play for Gordon, what’s a par season?  Somewhere around 1500 runs?  Half your games are at Chatswood Oval, which typically presents you with a very flat pitch and at least one tiny boundary: it’s an ugly place to bowl.  Manly scored 7 for 398 on the first day, and didn’t win.  On the second day, Louis Bhabra, Joe Gillard and Trystan Kennedy – three batsmen with very limited First Grade experience – guided Gordon to 1 for 152, and if Axel Cahlin had managed to get going, the home side might have run down Manly’s score.  As it was, they reached 8 for 347 before the game was drawn.  Honours went to Kennedy, who played very well for his first hundred in the top grade, which he carried on to 132.  Best for Manly was the veteran Ahillen Beadle who, despite being 63 years old (approximately) scored a stylish 60 opening the batting before winkling out three batsmen with his artful left-arm spin.

Harrison KING finds it easier in First Grade

Having taken three wickets in his first three Second Grade games of the season, Parramatta’s Harrison King (or, as PlayHQ calls him, Harrison KING) hadn’t stated an obvious case for promotion to Firsts.  But he was elevated for the game against Blacktown and made a good impression, bustling in and attacking the stumps.  Only two runs came from his first four overs, and he struck for the first time in his fifth, beating Puru Gaur for pace and winning an lbw decision.  An energetic right-arm fast-medium, KING (sorry, King) ended the game with 4-27 and 1-5, and he looks like a useful addition to the highly efficient Parramatta attack.

If we’re talking about you, you might be in trouble

Over the years, Five Things has gained a reputation (among its intensely devoted readership base of eighteen cricket nerds) as being, sometimes, a touch on the snarky side.  We’ve had complaints that we’ve implied that some players are a touch above their ideal playing weight, that certain batsmen are good at getting to twenty but not much further, and that we’ve picked on certain clubs more than others.  Some people even found our use of the term “pie-chucker” to be unnecessarily mean-spirited.  So this season, we’ve tried to be relentlessly positive and upbeat, but it hasn’t turned out very well.  In the last round, we lavished praise on Jordan Gauci, who promptly turned around and made 0 the next game.  We said nice things about Elijah Eales, who then went wicketless and missed out with the bat in his next outing.  We said that Randwick-Petersham was playing well, and that side spent the whole of the next Saturday leaking runs to Wests.  We welcomed the arrival of Gordon’s Mitchell Lole, who was then caned for 68 runs from 12 overs by Manly.  So… yeah.  The lesson is, don’t be too concerned if occasionally we sound harsh: the time to be really worried is when we say something nice about you.

Five Things We Learned form Round 3

Jordan Gauci is a throwback

When the 50-over format was first devised, back in the late 1970s, the role of the opening batsman was very different from the one that has evolved today.  Today, the job of the opener is to take advantage of the hard ball and fielding restrictions by smashing the ball all over the place and getting the innings off to a rapid start.  Initially, though, the idea was that an opener should play steadily, not doing anything too dramatic but ensuring that his side had wickets in hand for an assault on the bowling late in the day.  Against Blacktown on Saturday, Sydney University’s Jordan Gauci produced a classic of that genre.  Although he was always positive, he didn’t reach twenty until the 16th over of the innings, and he was happy to play a supporting role to Ryan McElduff for much of their partnership of 111.  But then, at the end of the innings, he cashed in so effectively that, with Oli Zannino, he took 90 runs from the last nine overs.  Gauci was strongest off his pads and on the back foot through the off side, he ran hard throughout and reached his hundred by pulling Jeremy Nunan brutally for four.  He was still there at the end, unbeaten on 139 from 137 balls, and proving that sometimes the old fashioned methods still work.

Blake Macdonald is in a hurry

For people who prefer newer technology, however, there’s Blake Macdonald.  So far this season, Macdonald has faced 328 balls for St George, from which he’s scored no fewer than 465 runs.  Readers over the age of fifty can remember the days when 500 runs was the benchmark of a good season’s batting in First Grade (and anyone over sixty can remember when it all but guaranteed you a place in the State squad).  Macdonald is almost there already, and it’s still October.  His effort against Sydney on Saturday was ruthless.  Macdonald went to the crease after Blake Nikitaras and Matt Rodgers (against his old club) had compiled an opening stand of 139, and he simply shredded the inexperienced attack.  He flicked his first ball through midwicket for two, and maintained more or less that rate of scoring throughout his innings, surging to 103 from only 54 deliveries.  Charlie Howard, a tidy medium pacer who runs in hard, suffered the brunt of the onslaught in the fortieth over of the innings.  The first ball, full on leg stump, vanished over midwicket for 6; then from the last three deliveries, Macdonald flicked a boundary through square leg, then picked up two more 6s with a slog-sweep and a pull.  He moved to 99 by sweeping medium-pacer Nikhil Ahluwalia for another 6, and then raised his hundred by tapping a single from the 49th ball he faced.  Following the Blues’ ordinary performance with the bat in Adelaide, it’s hard to see that Macdonald will have to wait too much longer for another chance at Shield level, especially as he scored 21 and 61 in his only opportunity last season.

A finger spinner played a key role at Asquith.  Just not that one.

At Asquith on Saturday, Nathan Lyon made his return to the field for the first time after he limped out of the Ashes series with a calf injury – and it was also his first appearance in Grade cricket for seven years.  This caused a certain amount of confusion among his Northern District team-mates, mostly on the complicated sociological question of just how senior a player you need to be before you get to call him “Gaz”.  After his first delivery was respectfully blocked, there was a shout of “Well bowled, Nathan”, something you never, ever hear when he plays for Australia.  That seemed rather too formal, so a few of the fielders chipped in with “Come on, Nath”.  His third ball drew a very loud, “Good bowling, Gaz!” from somewhere near midwicket, and there was a “mate” thrown in here or there, just to be safe.  Lachlan Shaw, behind the stumps, solved the problem by saying next to nothing.  Anyway, Nathan/Nate/Gaz/Mate was swiped for six in his first over by Angus Campbell, but otherwise bowled as neatly as you’d expect, allowing only 25 runs from his eight overs.  The damage all happened at the other end, through the less likely figure of Jonty Webb, who has approximately 496 fewer Test wickets than Lyon, no discernible nickname, and is basically a dart thrower.  Webb bowls left-arm orthodox; he’s not a tall man, he pushes the ball through quick and flat and accurate, and he can be annoyingly difficult to get away.  What makes his bowling interesting is that every now and then, he slows up a touch and turns the ball a fraction; Niran Wijewardene was bowled playing inside one that gripped a little, instead of sliding on straight.  Bankstown couldn’t come up with an answer, and Webb (who at one stage had 3-5) collected 4-24 from his ten overs as the visitors subsided for only 118. 

Mitchell Lole enjoyed the weekend

After several successful seasons in Newcastle, all-rounder Mitchell Lole is now trying his luck with Gordon, where he played Green Shield about six years ago.  If he accomplishes nothing else this season, he won’t forget his efforts last weekend, starting with a dominant display against Parramatta in Seconds, where he hit 76 and followed it up with 5-44.  That earned Lole a place in the T20 quarter-final the following day – also, as chance would have it, against Parramatta.  Lole didn’t need to bat, as James Newton and Trystan Kennedy gave Gordon a decent total of 3 for 163, but he played a crucial role with the ball, bowling both Param Uppal and Nick Bertus in his first over, the sixth of the innings.  That reduced Parramatta to 3 for 24, and although Patrick Xie counterattacked effectively, Parramatta never made up the ground they lost early.  Lole lopes up to the wicket and doesn’t generate any very threatening pace, but he bowls a full length, is accurate, and mixes it up.  He’s looking like a handy acquisition.

Elijah Eales went beserk

Throughout most of their innings against Eastern Suburbs on Saturday, Mosman seemed just slightly off the pace.  Blake Harper (89), Angus Robson (53) and Baxter Holt (47 not out) set up a solid total of 281, and although Peter Forrest (59) played well, the Whales needed 142 runs from the last 15 overs of their innings.  At which point, Matt Calder stepped up a gear or three.  He’d taken only two singles from the first seven balls he faced; in the next 21 balls he faced, he cleared the boundary seven times.  But Calder and Forrest fell in quick succession, and with seven overs remaining, Mosman still needed 60 runs.  They made it with an over to spare, as Elijah Eales carved his way to 47 not out from only 24 balls.  Easts spinner Ashkay Prasan bowls with a curious crouching action that makes it hard to figure out, from a distance, exactly what he’s trying to do, but unfortunately he dropped a couple of deliveries neatly into Eales’ hitting arc, and disappeared for two colossal sixes down the ground.  After a lengthy break while fieldsmen hunted for the ball, the left handed Eales cleared his front leg to wallop Harper over mid-on for another six.  Twelve were required from the last twelve balls, which in theory should have been tight, but Eales needed only one over, settling the result by heaving Sam Skelly over long on for yet another six.  Less glamorously, but perhaps just as importantly, Eales had earlier sent down three of the eight maiden overs bowled in the entire game.

Five Thing We Learned from Round Two

Daniel Sams still hits a long ball

First Grade newcomer Connor O’Riordan made a huge impact for Randwick-Petersham against Campbelltown on Saturday, capturing 4-38 with the ball and contributing 42 vital runs with the bat.  On any other day, we’d be talking more about him.  But not this time, because Randwick-Petersham, chasing a target of 247, were dead and buried at 5 for 67 before Daniel Sams played an absolutely ridiculous innings.  He no longer has a State contract and may not yet be fit to bowl, but he’s certainly good enough and healthy enough to hit the ball a tremendous distance.  Sams hammered his way to fifty in only 45 balls, and then went beserk, carving 76 runs from the last 40 balls he faced.  He raised his hundred by pulling a perfectly respectable delivery high over midwicket, one of the six sixes he hit, along with twelve fours.  Randwick-Petersham romped home with three overs to spare.

Brendon Piggott plays First Grade now

It’s taken Brendon Piggott a few seasons to climb through the ranks at Sutherland, but on the back of a solid effort in Second Grade last season, he earned a First Grade debut in Saturday’s 50-over match against Parramatta.  He didn’t waste his opportunity.  Batting with the more aggressive Tom Doyle and Ben Dwarshuis, Piggott began in a quiet supporting role, showing a neat defence and a fondness for flicking the ball through the on side.  But in the last six overs of Sutherland’s innings, he accelerated, helping Dwarshuis to smash 67 runs.  Piggott crunched a short ball from Dylan Stanley through square leg for four, then took the attack to Evan Pitt, slapping a four through cover and steering the next ball through point to the fence.  He brought up his fifty in the final over, nonchalantly picking up a good length delivery from Michael Sullivan and hoisting it over midwicket for six.  The next ball, the last of the innings, was another length ball on off stump, and Piggott flat-batted it over long on for six more.  He remained unbeaten on 59 from 57 balls, and Sutherland’s 4 for 239 was just enough to hold off a strong challenge from Parramatta (and Nick Bertus in particular).  No matter how many more innings Piggott plays in Firsts, he’ll not forget this one.

Bankstown 1, Fairfield 1

One unanticipated impact of this season’s frenetic draw was that Bankstown and Fairfield-Liverpool played each other twice last weekend: Bankstown won the 50-over game on Saturday, but were upset by their southwestern neighbours in the T20 “eliminator” on Sunday.  The main difference between the two games was that Fairfield managed to dismiss Daniel Solway on the Sunday (although he made 57 first) but not on the Saturday (when he hit 137 not out).  On Saturday, Bankstown needed six from the last over, and Solway knocked off the runs with three balls to spare.  On Sunday, Bankstown needed 22 runs from the last ten balls, with seven wickets standing, but fell in a heap against Josh Baraba, who removed Ethan Deal, Angus Campbell and Solway in the space of only four deliveries.  Luke Ohrynowsky would be perfectly happy playing Bankstown every week: he hit 50 from 71 on Saturday and 87 from 51 on Sunday.  This weekend, just for a change, Bankstown and Fairfield each play someone different.

Hayden McLean is good at one-day cricket

University of NSW has endured a tough few years off the field, fighting a long battle against an unsympathetic University administration that appears to have no appreciation of the value of sport in a university community.  The fact that they fight on, and continue to punch above their weight, is a testament to the spirit in the club.  Which is embodied by Hayden McLean, who continues to help the Bees to win games that appear to be lost.  On Sunday, in the T20 elimination final, his 2-6 from three overs helped to restrict Mosman to 8 for 114.  Elijah Eales and Jake Turner then reduced the Bees to 7 for 65, at which point 50 runs were needed from 47 balls.  But McLean turned the game, whacking 15 runs from the 16th over, bowled by Angus Parsons, and guiding his side to victory with an over to spare.  If anything, McLean was even more impressive on Saturday, when he bowled his fast-mediums so accurately that he captured 4-19 against Wests, including the big wickets of Josh Clarke and James Psarakis, a remarkable effort in a losing team.

Old club, new teams

Sydney University Cricket Club celebrates its 160th birthday this season (which is also the 170th anniversary of the first match played by a Sydney University team).  But the club broke new ground on Saturday when, for the first time, it fielded four teams in the Women’s Premier Cricket competition. 

There was once a Sydney University team that competed in the old Women’s First Grade competition – Ann Mitchell, the NSW bowler who became President of the International Women’s Cricket Council, was probably its best-known player.  But that was a separate club, formed under the auspices of the old Women’s Sports Union, and it folded at the end of the 1978-79 season.  Players from Sydney University and University of NSW later combined to form the Universities Women’s Cricket Club, but that club also disbanded last year.  All of which has led to four new teams joining Sydney’s oldest club, with Alex Blackwell in charge as coach and Phoebe Litchfield as the star recruit.  The new First Grade team went down to a strong Manly side on Sunday, largely due to a bright innings from Saskia Horley and some excellent bowling from Ebony Hoskin, but University’s Frankie Nicklin produced the best cricket of the day, hammering 65 from only 33 balls with 12 fours and a six.  Nicklin, who’s still only 18, played once for NSW last season and is clearly a player to watch.

Five Things We Learned from... those rounds that just happened...

Strange days indeed

We’re not actually being critical when we say this – innovation is good – but the new Kingsgrove Sports T20 competition is weird.  It’s not just the fact that decades of experience have accustomed us to the idea of finals happening at the back end of a season – and here we are, just at the point where, conventionally, the season would have started, and we already have a bunch of teams going to the finals.  That’s unusual, sure, but it’s not necessarily weird. 

What is weird, though, is that the preliminary rounds of the competition occupied exactly a week and a day, whereas the finals will now take place over the next four weekends.  Is there any other sporting competition, anywhere, where the finals take four times as long as the regular season?  We haven’t found one, although we are waiting to hear back from the Icelandic Over-70 Mixed Soccer Tournament.

Also on the weird side is the strangely democratic nature of the finals.  Traditionally, sporting finals occur after the regular season has performed a kind of filtering service, sorting out the good teams (the ones that tend to win more games) from the weaker ones and the ones that, let’s be honest, are a bit crap.  Ordinarily, if you get to the finals it means you’ve had a pretty solid season.  This competition has no time for that kind of elitism, and instead invites the top three sides from each pool into the final rounds.  What this meant was that it was mathematically possible, at the start of the fifth preliminary round, for a few teams to reach the finals by winning only one of their four games.  We’re not saying this is a bad thing but, boy, it’s different.  Most seasons, if you lose three-quarters of your games, you look for somewhere to hide, instead of saying, “hey, we made the finals”.

Anyway, normally we’d tell you who got through to the finals, but that’s most of the teams, so instead we’ll tell you who missed out.  Wests, Easts, North Sydney, Sydney, Northern District, Manly, Sutherland, Blacktown – consider yourselves unlucky.

The Students are into stride early

Sydney University secured its advancement in the T20 competition with comfortable home wins over Gordon and Hawkesbury.  The University pitch, it has to be said, wasn’t ideal for T20 cricket, being on the slow and low side (which is, in fairness, pretty normal for this time of year) and Gordon bowled well to contain the Students until Tim Cummins took control with an outstanding, unbeaten 68 from 38 balls.  Cummins drove imperiously and, picking the ball to hit, cleared the fence four times to give his side a presentable total.  Gordon’s chances appeared to rest on openers Axel Cahlin and Tym Crawford, and Crawford began brightly with a couple of meaty strokes.  But the pitch always looked likely to suit Kieran Tate’s skiddy, stump-to-stump pace, and he bowled Crawford with his first delivery.  Tate also removed Louis Bhabra in a double-wicket maiden, and when Will Salzmann bowled Cahlin, Gordon was deep in trouble.  The game rather fizzled out after that, enlivened mainly by Devlin Malone’s mopping-up and Nick Larkin’s spectacular direct-hit run out of James Newton.  Tate was also a key figure in the win over Hawkesbury on Sunday, striking first ball for the second time in as many days and collecting 2-1 in his opening over to duplicate (briefly) his figures from the previous day.  The platform for the Students’ solid total was Hayden Kerr’s intelligent 50, backed by a bright cameo from Damien Mortimer.  The other feature of the University innings was a remarkable performance with the ball by off-spinner Jack James, whose first 16 balls were punished for 37 runs before he removed Kerr, Tim Cummins and Damien Mortimer with successive deliveries to claim a most unexpected hat-trick.

Jack Wood will have fries with that

Randwick-Petersham were arguably the standout side in the pool stages of the T20 competition, smashing their way through Pool A to sweep all four of their matches.  Tight bowling, especially from Riley Ayre, suffocated a pretty strong Penrith line-up, and a century partnership between Anthony Sams (46) and Jason Sangha (68 not out) sealed a very convincing victory.  In the second half of Saturday’s double-header, Josh Clarke’s impressive 83 from 48 helped Wests to post a strong total of 7 for 178, only for openers Anthony Sams and Jack Wood to respond with a partnership of 133 in just eleven overs.  Sams played another lively innings, but it was Wood who stole the show, belting an unbeaten 101 from 50 balls with a ridiculous nine sixes.  One of those sixes is said to have cleared the Coogee McDonald’s, an event that caused a minor sensation since it’s almost unheard of for an RPs player to go past McDonald’s.  Dropped on 41 (a steepling hit to long-on), Wood reached his fifty in the fifth over having faced 21 balls (and with Sams having reached only 6).  Anyway, Randwick-Petersham strolled home with two overs to spare – even though its Australian T20 representative, Daniel Sams, scored just one run and didn’t bowl.  It’s a team packed with power hitters and bowling options, and it will be hard to beat.

There are days when bowling is for idiots

There’s an event that takes place every year in American Major League Baseball called the Home Run Derby.  If you haven’t seen it, it works like this: teams nominate their most powerful hitters, who take it in turns to face a pitcher who lobs baseballs towards them with deliberate slowness and lack of menace.  The hitters compete to see how often they can blast the ball out of the park.  The batters don’t bother wearing protective equipment, although the pitchers certainly do.  Apparently this is considered to be fun, and it’s rather like what happened at Hurstville on Saturday in the T20 game between Fairfield and Blacktown.  From the 240 legitimate deliveries bowled in the match, 454 runs were scored.  21 sixes were hit or, to put it another way, 9% of the balls bowled in the match went over the fence.  Another 18% of balls bowled were hit for four.  Jaydyn Simmons led the way by carving 134 not out from 66 balls, including 26 from the final over of Fairfield’s innings.  Which is impressive, except that Simmons wasn’t even the fastest batsmen in his team’s innings – Nick Carruthers needed only 23 balls for his 60 runs.  Blacktown then mounted a believable chase through Eknoor Singh’s 101 off 64.  Josh Baraba was the tidiest bowler in the game, leaking merely seven runs an over.  It’s entertainment of a kind, we guess, but on days like this you wonder who’d bother signing up to be a bowler.

Evan Pitt held his nerve

One of the promises of T20 cricket is an exciting finish, although this happens a lot less than you might expect – one consequence of the shortest format is that sometimes a team falls so far behind in the game that there simply isn’t enough time to fight back.  But there was an extraordinary finish at Merrylands on Sunday, when Northern District went into the final over against Parramatta needing 11 to win with five wickets in hand.  The odds in that situation generally favour the bat, especially as the non-striker, Nikhil Chaudhary, had hammered five sixes on his way to 49 from only 21 balls.  But seamer Evan Pitt produced an exceptional final over, swinging the game in favour of Parramatta by allowing only a single from his first two balls.  With the pressure now squarely on the batsmen, Pitt had Chaudhary and Lachlan Fisher caught from successive balls, leaving Mitchell Crayn, the new batter, to hit a four and a six to win the game.  He managed the four, but could only squeeze a single from the final delivery, giving Parramatta the win by just four runs.

Five Things We Learned from Whatever Round We Call That One

It’s all going off out there

For about one hundred and thirty years, the opening round of the First Grade season has gone like this (unless it rained, and apart from the occasional season that opened with a one-day game): somewhere between six and ten games have been played, in which half the teams have won the toss and batted on slow pitches, and ground their way towards a satisfactory total at the end of the first day.  Normally the season wouldn’t even have started yet: this year, already, after a single day’s play, 16 top-grade games have been decided.  It’s going to take some getting used to.  “Five things” doesn’t seem like quite enough this week.  We need about fifteen, except we didn’t really learn them, because it’s too hard to keep up.  Did you see that Jason Sangha scored a really fast hundred?  We’d tell you more, but we’re out of space.

It's also going to take some time to get used to how the different clubs look this season.  It has been many years since there have been so many off-season player movements.  The Sydney team that fronted up for the first match this season contained only two of the players who appeared in Firsts for the club in Round 15 last season.  Players are flying in all directions and it’s no surprise that PlayHQ can’t keep up.  “Fill-in” had an absolute blinder on the weekend, turning the course of several matches.

The Students are back in the groove

A revamped Sydney University side wasted no time getting back in the groove, fighting past Sydney and North Sydney to sit at the top of Pool B.  New recruit Will Salzmann made an immediate impact, cracking four sixes in his match-winning 68 (from 38) against Sydney.  Salzmann bowled well too, picking up 3-34 against Sydney and 3-33 in the win over North Sydney.  Jack Attenborough made a quiet start for his new club with the bat, but played an unexpected part in the game against North Sydney when he was entrusted with the ball.  Attenborough played 79 First Grade matches for University of NSW, in which he bowled just a single over (which went for 13 runs).  For reasons unclear to anyone but the University captain (“pace off the ball”, maybe?), Attenborough was brought into the attack for the sixth over of North Sydney’s innings, to send down very slow deliveries that a person in a generous mood might call off-breaks, to one of the longest hitters in the competition, Justin Avendano.  It felt borderline suicidal, and looked like it when Avendano launched Attenborough’s third ball over the fence.  But two balls later, Avendano whacked a catch straight to Salzmann, and in his next over Attenborough trapped the dangerous James Greenslade lbw.  He ended up with a highly improbable 2-14 from three overs, after which it almost made sense that University collected the points (in the last over of its chase) through the bat of Devlin Malone, who carved Hugh Sheriff away for the three decisive runs.

Axel Cahlin spoiled Steve O’Keefe’s homecoming

One of the happier off-season stories was the return of Steve O’Keefe to Hawkesbury, where (presumably) he’ll play out the end of his career at the club where it all began.  O’Keefe didn’t bowl badly in his first match back (he never does), but he was upstaged by Axel Cahlin, who monopolised the scoring to such an extent that he hit 101 not out in a Gordon total of 1 for 139.  Tym Crawford contributed only 10 to an opening stand of 54, and Louis Bhabra made 17 in an unbroken second-wicket partnership of 85.  It took Cahlin six balls to get off the mark, and he made only two runs from the first 12 balls he faced, but then he accelerated spectacularly.  The 15th over of the innings, bowled by Adrian Van der Nieuwboer, went for 19 runs, ending with two successive sixes, both hoicked over the leg side.  When the 19th over began Gordon needed six to win and Cahlin was 93.  He flat-batted the first ball from seamer Javed Ahmed Mohammed through the off side to the fence, blocked the second, and dabbed the third away to the third man boundary, bringing up both Gordon’s first win, and the first century of the new season.

St George look fairly decent at full strength

Although St George wasn’t quite at full strength, because one of their Test players (Moises Henriques) played in Round 1, then made way for the other (Kurtis Patterson) to play in Round 2.  Their two Shield openers, Blake Squared (Nikitaras x Macdonald), played both matches, in which Sutherland and Blacktown were swept aside pretty ruthlessly.  Most of the damage was done by the absurdly consistent Macdonald, who blasted 73 from 44 (six 6s) against Sutherland and 83 from 39 (six more 6s) against Blacktown.  Henriques chipped in with 2-15 and 42 from 29 (three 6s) against Sutherland.  Pick of the bowlers, as so often in recent seasons, was the hostile Peter Francis.

Austin Waugh came back

Another good-news story from opening day was the reappearance – after a prolonged break – of Austin Waugh in the Sutherland side.  Waugh took a couple of years out of the game, apparently because it had stopped being fun.  He was useful rather than spectacular in his comeback games – a couple of handy short innings, some important wickets and some sharp work in the field.  He was lively with the bat against Fairfield, spanking Australian Under-19 spinner Cameron Frendo through cover, pulling and slashing boundaries from Yuva Nishchay and then launching Nishchay high over midwicket for six.  And, yes, he was dropped, and yes, there were a couple of airswings.  But that isn’t really what matters – what counts is that he rediscovers the simple pleasures of putting bat to ball, striving to win, and drinking something cold afterwards. 

Five Things We Learned from Round 15

So that happened…

Just to recap: playing at home, Manly was sent in by Sydney University.  The openers both responded to that challenge by scoring centuries – 103 for Matt Brewster, 107 for Jack Edwards.  For most of the innings, Manly skipped along at around five-and-a-half an over, and then Joel Davies iced the cake with 41 from only 19 balls.  Manly ended up on 5 for 296.  Then they reduced University to 4 for 107, with the dangerous Hayden Kerr and Nick Larkin both back in the sheds.

They didn’t win.

Sydney University has made a habit this season of salvaging games from seemingly hopeless positions.  This time, the fightback began with a bright, counter-punching partnership of 103 between Damien Mortimer and Jordan Gauci.  Then, when the chase stumbled and the required run rate crept up above eight, Mortimer and keeper Oli Zannino added 51 in rapid time.  University needed 19 from the last two overs, with three wickets in hand.  It seemed as though Manly had struck a critical blow when Mortimer was run out on the third ball of the 49th over, for a superbly-constructed 91.  14 were needed from the final over, and that became 14 from 5 balls when Devlin Malone skied Josh Seward’s first ball to cover. The last University batsman, Kieran Tate, had played 51 matches in First Grade without ever hitting a six: he calmly carved the first ball he received high over wide long-on.  A scrambled leg-bye put Caelan Maladay on strike, and he spanked three deliveries hard into the covers.  The first went for four, the second was stopped, and the third raced to the fence to give the Students an extraordinary win.

The result earned University the minor premiership.  In fairness to Manly, it was fielding a below-strength attack, with Mickey Edwards having left to begin his stint with Yorkshire and Ryan Hadley and Joel Foster also missing.  This may not have been the last match between these two sides this season.

Manly has had an epic season

Despite its loss to the Students in Firsts (and a thumping in Seconds), there’s no doubt that this has been an absolutely epic season for Manly.  The Blues won the club championship by a massive margin, and made the finals in every grade, finishing up second in Firsts, first in Seconds, third in Thirds and first in Fourths and Fifths.  They did all that while supplying the Edwards brothers, Ryan Hadley and Ollie Davies to the NSW team (and, at least in theory, Mitchell Starc to the Test side), as well as Steve O’Keefe and Jay Lenton to the Big Bash.  It’s often difficult for a club that reaches the finals in multiple grades to win premierships, because they come up against teams that have been stacked (sorry… selected creatively).  But even if Manly doesn’t win another game (which they will), it will have been a remarkable season for the club.

Parramatta is finishing with a wet sail

Parramatta completed its charge to the finals with a narrow win over a fighting Sutherland side.  The early stages of the match were dominated by Parramatta, who surged away to reach 1 for 181, thanks to Ryan Hackney, Ben Abbott and Nick Bertus.  But Sutherland chipped away, Tom Doyle burgled three wickets with what passes for off-spin, and Parramatta was eventually contained to 8 for 241, which was more or less par.  James Arnold (64) and the aggressive Ben Dwarshuis (35) carried Sutherland into a strong position at 4 for 211, but when Dwarshuis was dismissed, the momentum faltered.  Sutherland needed 11 from the last over, with three wickets standing.  Tom Straker pumped the first ball from Alex Evans down the ground, but was run out attempting a second run; Liam Hehir clipped his first ball through the on-side for one, but Will Straker played around the next ball and was bowled.  Sutherland needed 9 from the last three balls, then six from the last ball of the day; but Hehir failed to make contact with a hopeful swish and Parramatta took the game by five runs.  On paper, Parramatta’s bowling looks no more than workmanlike and enthusiastic, but Evans has enjoyed a very successful season, and they’re capable of upsetting the more strongly fancied sides in the finals.

Josh Bawcombe had a day out

Hawkesbury’s Fifth Grade lost to Bankstown on the weekend.  It wasn’t Josh Bawcombe’s fault.  In Bankstown’s innings of 152, he caught the first five batsmen, then stumped a sixth, and ran out another.  Hawkesbury’s reply never got out of first gear: all out for 107.  But Bawcombe made 57 of them; only one other batsman reached double figures.  This, by some distance, is the Best Performance by a Player in a Team That Got Pounded in Round 15.

Genetics may have something to do with it

Readers of a certain age may recall Sydney University matches from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Craig Tomko batted in the top order, stylishly if a little bottom-handedly, while Darby Quoyle struck the ball cleanly and bowled, when he felt like it, with disconcerting pace.  Both had plenty of reason to be happy with the events of Round 15, and it had nothing to do with Sydney University.  At Bon Andrews Park, Finn Nixon-Tomko, son of Craig, opened the batting for North Sydney’s Thirds against University of NSW, and calmly compiled his first century in Premier Cricket, a polished 107 from 149 balls.  Meanwhile, at Whalan Reserve, Gabriel Quoyle (son of Darby) helped Easts to dismiss Blacktown for only 55, returning the striking figures of 4-9 from 9.2 overs.  Arguably, though, genetics tell only part of the story: although Darby was a right-arm fast bowler, Gabriel bowls left-arm finger spin (and Finn, unlike his father, bats left-handed).  Norths’ Thirds and Easts’ Fourths have both progressed to the finals this weekend.

(This was the last instalment of Five Things for the season. And we got through it without calling anyone a pie-chucker. Thanks for following us, and good luck in the finals!)

Five Things We Learned from Round 14

There’s a play-off at Manly this weekend

With one day’s play remaining before the finals, three sides – Manly, Sydney University and St George – are certain of playing on into autumn.  All three clubs enjoyed wins in Round 14.  Ben Bryant (85) and Ryan Hadley (5-31) were the main difference between Manly and University of NSW, Damien Mortimer’s clutch innings of 89 not out guided the Students home against Easts, and spinners Joshua Moors and Raf Macmillan undermined Sutherland after the Sharks had reached 1 for 179.  Manly (61.9) and Sydney University (60) will meet in a virtual play-off for the minor premiership at Manly Oval – although if University wins and St George (59) nabs a bonus-point win, the Saints would finish first through a superior quotient.   After that, it gets interesting, and messy.  Parramatta (54) jumped into fourth spot with an emphatic outright win over Mosman, and will remain in the six if they beat Sutherland, which they’d expect to do.  If the Sharks spring an upset, though, Parramatta could theoretically miss the finals altogether if Northern District (50) beat St George, Randwick-Petersham (48) beat the shellshocked Mosman, and Penrith (47) beat Campbelltown with a bonus point.  Northern District came agonisingly close to an outright win over Bankstown, but remain on 50 points, so they face the tough assignment of beating St George – if not, they’ll need four of the five sides behind them to lose.  Randwick-Petersham faces a similar equation – if they can’t beat Mosman, they’ll need all of the sides behind them to lose.  And for Penrith (47), University of NSW (47), Bankstown (45) and Sydney (45), it’s simple: win, and hope that one or both of Northern District and Randwick-Petersham loses.

Manly are minor premiers in Seconds

Manly has commanding lead in the club championship that you’d expect from the club on top of the ladder in both Firsts and Seconds, and the lead in Second Grade is so dominant that the Blues could turn up at the wrong university on Saturday and still be minor premiers by a street.  Manly walloped University of NSW in Round 14, despite collapsing to 4 for 10 on the first morning of the game.  They’re on 64, 10 points clear of Northern District and St George.  There is no possible universe in which one of Northern District and St George misses the finals, but they meet each other in the last round in what is, effectively, a playoff for second.  Mosman (51), Gordon (50) and Bankstown (49) fill out the six: Mosman needs to beat Randwick-Petersham, Gordon needs the points against Wests and Bankstown must beat Hawkesbury.  But if any of them should stumble, Easts (46), North Sydney (46) or Sydney University (44) could jump in to the six – although the Students would need to beat Manly to do it.  They’ll be regretting a tight draw against Easts last Saturday, when the Dolphins held on with the last pair at the crease.

Three sides are safe in Thirds

It's a similar picture in Third Grade, where the top three – Parramatta (65), Randwick-Petersham (64) and Manly (61) are heading for the finals.  UTS North Sydney (57) also looks pretty safe, although if you’re creative enough you can construct scenarios in which they miss out – but they all involve being bowled out for seven, while other teams get bonus points.  The pressure is on St George (54) and Penrith (51), although Penrith will fancy their chances against a winless Campbelltown side.  If either Saints or the Panthers trip up, they could miss out to Easts (50), Bankstown (50) or Wests (49).  Wests hauled themselves into contention in Round 14 by blasting out Campbelltown for 51 and 62, with Dean Jones grabbing 6-19.

Fourth Grade is a cluster

Manly – again – ends the Fourth Grade season in a dominant position, on top (with 70) by 13 points and with an absurdly good quotient, and that despite a loss to University of NSW in Round 14.  Parramatta (57) and North Sydney (56) will join them in the finals.  But then it’s tighter.  Gordon (50) is fourth, but if they lose to Wests (45), the Magpies will pass them from tenth spot.  But that won’t guarantee Wests a place in the finals, because there are four sides (St George, Easts, Bankstown and Sydney) on 46, as well as Bankstown on 45.  St George may consider themselves slightly unfortunate to have had their chances dented by one Mr Stuart Clark of Sutherland, who (with 32 and 4-12) dominated a low-scoring Round 14 game in which, for a change, Stephen Wark was not the only player over forty-five on the ground.  Anyway, there are too many permutations to contemplate here, especially as none of the contenders plays against another.  We’re not in the predictions business, but it’s quite possible that four or five teams could end up with 52 points, and would then need to be spilt on quotients.

The Bears lead in Fifths

UTS North Sydney (70) is well placed to take the minor premiership in Fifth Grade, holding a six point lead over Manly, and needing only to beat 17th-placed University of NSW. The Bears survived a scare in Round 14, holding off Blacktown to win a low-scoring war of attrition in which only 203 runs were scored in 128 overs.  In fact, only one finals spot is up for grabs in the last round: St George (59), Northern District (59) and Parramatta (53) will all play on.  Easts (45) hold sixth spot, but they’re vulnerable to Sutherland (45), Mosman (44) and Sydney University (44).  Even Blacktown (40) could pass the Dolphins if they beat Easts on Saturday. 

Five Things We Learned from Round 13

And then there were nine…

With just two rounds remaining before the finals, there are only three teams outside the top six with any realistic prospect of playing at the end of March.  Northern District’s pounding at the hands of Manly leaves the Rangers precariously positioned in sixth place, on 44 points, ahead of Parramatta only by virtue of a superior quotient.  Behind them lurk Randwick-Petersham (42) and Penrith (41).  Five Things doesn’t do predictions – we have enough other ways to look silly without trying that.  But the big game this week appears to be the match between leaders Manly (55.9) and fourth-placed University of NSW (47).  If the Bees win, they just about seal their place in the top six.  Lose, though, and they could be passed by any or all of the five teams currently behind them.  Just as important is the game between Bankstown (45) and Northern District (44) – the team that fails to take points from that encounter may very well lose control of its destiny, and need other sides to lose in the last round in order to reach the playoffs.  

Sam Robson bowled again

Last week we made mention of Sam Robson’s return to the bowling crease, when he picked up three wickets against Hawkesbury.  Fun stat of the week: despite his background as a teenaged leg-spin prodigy, in 189 first-class matches (mostly for Middlesex) Robson has taken precisely eleven wickets.  But clearly the muscle memory is still there.  Against Wests last weekend, Robson ripped through the visiting side to take 6-35 from only twelve overs.  It would be nice to report that he was drifting the ball in, before turning it past the outside edge to hit the top of off.  But in fact, Robson’s more of a Kumble than a Warne, bowling from a decent height and pushing the ball through quickly.  Most of his wickets came when the Wests batsmen tried to carve him through the off side but found the fieldsmen instead (although Max Glen did execute a couple of stumpings).  Easts had every reason to be satisfied with their bowling – Oliver Patterson, the left arm seamer and son of former Easts great Mark, made a pair of early breakthroughs to take his first wickets in Firsts, and Wests were dismissed for 175.  In reply, Easts reached 3 for 104 but the Dolphins then fell in a heap against the lively Muhammad Irfan (3-39) and Jack Bermingham (4-17), losing five wickets for four runs before falling short by 38 runs.

Manly’s bowlers are a threat, just not always how you’d expect

Northern District won the toss against Manly on the weekend, and not much else.  The Rangers were probably expecting a tough morning against State representatives Mickey Edwards, Ryan Hadley and Jack Edwards when they chose to bat first, but wouldn’t have expected to go to lunch at 7 for 30, and wouldn’t have expected most of the damage to have been done by Joel Foster.  It was Hadley who struck first, when David Lowery groped forward and managed a fine nick through to Jay Lenton.  But it was Foster’s nippy medium-pace that did for debutant Cameron Tunks, caught at slip, and three balls later a tentative Lachlan Shaw was lbw.  The innings limped on for 43 overs, but realised only 51 runs, Foster taking 5-11.  Opener Tunks top-scored in his first game in Firsts, but made no more than 13.  Manly ran up a big lead by stumps, and were well placed to push for outright points had any play been possible on the second day.

Ben Abbott is fun to watch

For a while, it looked as though Parramatta’s push for a finals spot was in serious trouble: batting first, they slumped to 5 for 107 against Fairfield-Liverpool.  Josh Baraba and Jaydyn Symmyns (sorry, Simmons) both bowled well early in the day, and they picked up Ryan Hackney and Nick Bertus cheaply.  Simmons bowled two really good overs to Bertus, and was rewarded when a loose drive was pouched at slip.  Ben Abbott came in with his side in trouble, and he reacted by doing… well, by doing what Ben Abbott does.  Have you ever watched him between balls?  He stands with his bat on his shoulder, like an axe, and that’s more or less how he uses it.  Arjun Nair forced him to block a few balls early on, but defence isn’t really Abbott’s game, and soon he swung a ball that was only fractionally short to the fence at square leg.  Abbott prefers the ball coming towards him with some pace, and in Baraba’s 12th over, he carved a fullish ball over point for 4, then cracked a length ball on off stump over midwicket for another boundary, punched an on-drive for 2, smashed another drive straight for 4, and leaned back to smack the ball past cover for another 4.   Abbott raced to 63 from 62 balls, Parramatta recovered to reach 255, and its season remains alive.

Five Things We Learned from Round 12

The Students are off to another grand final

Sydney University has won its way through to play Northern District in the grand final of the First Grade Limited Overs competition and, not for the first time this season, the most appropriate response is: how the hell did that just happen?  For about three-quarters of the match at David Phillips, University of NSW was winning in a canter.  Declan White knocked the top of the visitors’ innings, taking the key wickets of Hayden Kerr, Nick Larkin and Damien Mortimer in an incisive opening spell.  Tim Cummins (51) stabilised the innings with a responsible captain’s knock but after Ryan Meppem grabbed three quick wickets, it took some lower-order defiance from Devlin Malone and Caelan Maladay to boost the Students to a barely-respectable 161.  White wrapped up the innings to finish with a well-deserved 5-32, and the Bees looked to be cruising when Jack Attenborough and Tom Scoble peeled 40 runs from the first ten overs.  The Sydney University attack kept things tidy, but the Bees reached 1 for 119, needing only 43 runs from the last 15 overs.  At which point, Max Hope was introduced into the attack.  Hope has regained his First Grade spot this season, making a strong contribution with his forthright left-handed batting and sure slip catching, and no impact at all with the ball – in fact, in his 33 First Grade matches, he’d taken only seven wickets with his orthodox finger-spin.  But in his first over, Suffan Hassan missed a swipe across the line and was lbw; a few balls later, Ben Green was bowled, aiming to hit over mid-wicket, and when Attenborough’s chip over cover was held by Malone, Hope had taken 3-6.  Caelan Maladay bowled a suffocating spell that was rewarded with two wickets, and Hope had Meppem and Krishna Padmanabhan deftly stumped by Cummins from successive deliveries, the Bees were deep in trouble. Eight wickets fell for 25 runs, Hope grabbing 6-16.  The last pair, Hayden McLean and Declan White, needed 18 runs from the final three overs, but Kerr and Hugo Ikeda closed out the innings ruthlessly, leaving Sydney University the improbable winners by 12 runs.   

We don’t have a top six yet, but we’re getting there

The makeup of the top six in First Grade became only marginally clearer after Round 12’s results.  Sydney University virtually guaranteed themselves a spot in the finals with a demolition job on Blacktown, which began with a massive opening stand between Jordan Gauci (156) and Don Butchart (115).  Manly are all but assured of a finals berth too, after excellent pace bowling by Ryan Hadley and Mickey Edwards redeemed a limp batting effort to defeat Sydney by just 37 runs.  St George consolidated its place in a low-scoring win over University of NSW, in which Trent Copeland followed his 6-54 with a cool-headed innings and a match-winning stand with Jono Craig-Dobson.  Northern District looked like losing touch with the leaders when it lost its ninth wicket still needing 18 runs to beat Mosman, but Mitchell Crayn led the Rangers to the points with a brilliant 110 not out.  And Randwick-Petersham surged into the top six by defeating Wests.

But there were some costly slip-ups.  Bankstown were outplayed by Fairfield, and dropped out of the six.  Mosman, North Sydney and Sydney can now reach the finals only by a string of freak results.  And Penrith’s momentum was slowed, possibly fatally, by a draw with Sutherland.  Of the teams currently outside the top six, only Bankstown, Parramatta, Fairfield and Penrith have any real chance of getting there – and they’ll need a lot of luck.  The biggest contest in Round 13 is the clash between Manly and Northern District, which the Rangers may need to win in order to remain in the top six.

Parramatta bats backwards

Weird game of the round was at North Sydney Oval, where the Bears won the toss and invited Parramatta to bat.  It looked like a sensible decision when the consistently excellent James Campbell (supported by James Aitken, whose run-up and delivery lead Five Things to believe that a comeback may yet be possible) made good use of a greenish pitch and reduced Parramatta to 8 for 89.  What happened next made absolutely no sense at all: Evan Pitt and Alex Evans added 85 runs for the ninth wicket, and then Pitt and Michael Sullivan shared a last-wicket partnership of 90.  Pitt has been highly reliable with the ball this season, and no more than handy with the bat.  But he settled in quietly before announcing himself by driving Campbell twice to the cover boundary.  Aitken thought he had Pitt dropped behind the wicket with the score on 130, but there were few other chances and not much tailend swiping.  The left-handed Evans cracked Aitken over mid-wicket for 6, pulled another 6 from Harrison May, and drove confidently.  Pitt reached 98 before he fended at May, but got the ball no further than Thomas Jagot at second slip.  In their reply, North Sydney suffered an almost identical collapse, losing 8-91: Pitt took the first two wickets, and Sullivan (5-29) bowled impressively.  But the Bears’ tail couldn’t triple the score, and Parramatta took the points.  To make the game even odder, Sheridon Gumbs made his debut in Firsts for North Sydney, but left the game (to join the England Under 19s) at the end of the first day, and so didn’t get to bat.  Only a few weeks ago, North Sydney sat high on the competition table, but this defeat may well have ended their season.

Sam Konstas is a machine

Sutherland’s strong performance against Penrith was built on the foundation of an opening stand of 224 between Andrew Deitz (101) and, inevitably, Sam Konstas.  The partnership was a new First Grade record for Sutherland, which was something of a surprise since Deitz hasn’t opened the batting since making a duck in Second Grade in Seconds four seasons ago, and has never previously opened in First Grade.  Nor had he ever scored a Premier Cricket hundred.  Konstas, though.  His innings made him the first player to score 1000 runs in all grades for Sutherland in his first season with the club.  Phil Jaques (593 in 2nds and 223 in PGs, a total of 816) and Jason Young (812 in 1sts) – both in 1996-97 – had previously been the most successful first-season players for the Sharks.  Konstas has also equalled the club record for most centuries in a season with four, joining Les Johns (1985-86), Justin Kenny (1990-91), Matthew Bradley (1996-97), Grant Davies (2005-06), Phil Jaques (2005-06) and Jamie Brown (2015-16 & 2017-18).  This is the second consecutive season that Konstas has achieved both feats, having scored 1139 runs with 4 centuries last season for St George.  He might do some real damage to the Sutherland record books once he finishes school.

Strange things happen to leg spin prodigies

Hawkesbury took the bold step last round of introducing leg spinner Aarush Soni to First Grade – at the age of 15 years and 83 days.  That made Soni the youngest ever Hawkesbury First Grader, and (by our count) the eighth youngest First Grader ever.  It didn’t go entirely to plan: Soni bowled three spells, and was punished pretty heavily, as Easts ran up 352 (although, unusually in a total of that size, no-one made more than Adam Sidhu’s 59).  Curiously, though, playing for Easts was Sam Robson, who was only 16 when he made his First Grade debut – for University of NSW.  Then, like Soni, he was a leg-spinner who went in last.  No one then foresaw that he would develop into an opening batsman for Middlesex, England and Easts, whose bowling was occasionally called upon as a last resort.  All of which is to say that the talented Soni could end up in any number of places.  Or he may, like Robson, remember his roots as a leggie: allowed a rare turn with the ball last Saturday, Robson wrapped up the Hawkesbury innings with a spell of 3-18.

Five Things We Learned from Round 11

Sydney University’s season makes no sense at all

Sydney University’s season is all over the place.  The First Grade side recently scored 91, 119, 7 for 72 and 78 in successive innings.  The top order seems to have suffered a collective loss of form.  It has the kind of quotient that’s usually helpful to separate eleventh place from twelfth.  And yet the Students reached the final of the T20 competition, won a semi-final place in the Limited Overs competition, and perch at the top of the First Grade ladder.  This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but there are a few possible explanations.  The first is the team’s ability to find vital contributions from unlikely places.  In the match against North Sydney, on a bowler-friendly pitch, 40 wickets fell while only 324 runs were scored: but Max Hope, playing his first two-day game in Firsts in several years, top-scored with 52, besides holding five catches.  On Sunday, when St George looked like building an imposing target in the Limited Overs quarter-final, the bowler who helped the Students regain control was Hugo Ikeda, playing in only his first season in Firsts, but already showing a remarkable knack for taking wickets at important moments.  Perhaps a more obvious reason for University’s success is leg spinner Devlin Malone: bowling as well as ever, he passed 50 wickets for the season on the weekend: proving that if it seams, it spins, he routed North Sydney with 4-9 and 3-14.  On top of that, Nick Larkin has returned from BBL duties, and against St George on Sunday, he put on a masterclass.  After watching Trent Copeland reduce University to 3-6, he blasted 108 from 95 balls, a batsman totally in command of his own game and whatever St George could throw at him.  His presence will make a huge different to University at the business end of the season.

13 into six doesn’t go

With four rounds remaining before the finals, it’s time to consider who’s still in the running.  As a general rule of thumb, a side needs about 54 points – nine wins – to be reasonably certain of a finals place.  The table was shaken up by some unexpected results last weekend – Bankstown, Sydney University and Randwick-Petersham scooped outrights, while there were top-of-the table draws involving Northern District, University of NSW, Sydney and St George.  Manly lost a chance to extend its lead after setting Parramatta something of a soft target.  All that resulted in a bunch of sides sitting just above 40 – Sydney University on 48, Manly on 44.4, St George and University of NSW on 41.  Three wins will get those sides into the finals, two might be enough, and one probably won’t (one more win could be all Sydney University needs, but we wouldn’t recommend that as a strategy).  Then it gets complicated.  Sydney is 13th with 29 points.  Four wins could get the Tigers to the finals.  But they have to play Manly and Sydney University, so that won’t be easy.  Four wins could also do the trick for Fairfield (31), reigning premiers Mosman (32), UTS North Sydney (32) and Parramatta (32).  Mosman faces Northern District this round, in a rematch of last year’s grand final, and a loss could effectively end the Whales’ season.  Just outside the four are Randwick-Petersham (36) and Penrith (34), who are arguably the form teams in the competition, and it would be a bold move to bet against them continuing their momentum, especially as both sides play lower-placed opposition in Round 12.  And of course, there’s rain about, and washouts and outrights can still make things very messy.

Parramatta took out the Green Shield

Parramatta, the most consistent side throughout this season’s Green Shield competition, took out the title by defeating Hawkesbury at Merrylands.  The foundation for the win was a second-wicket partnership of 144 between Rajeev Navaratnam and Nitesh Samuel, who put their side firmly in control after Hawkesbury invited Parramatta to bat.  Navaratnam fell for 91, and Samuel followed his match-winning 93 not out in the semi-final with a polished 82.  Hawkesbury’s bowlers stuck to their task well, but to reach the target of 232, the Hawks needed to post their highest total of the season.  Parramatta captain Nilaathan Kulendran put his side on top with two quick wickets, after which Hawkesbury was always slightly behind the game, although they fought hard and the outcome wasn’t decided until the 48th over.  If Green Shield shows us what Premier Cricket will look like in the near future, it’s significant that more than half of the players in the final came from western Sydney’s rapidly growing south Asian population.

Sutherland and Easts produced the week’s craziest game

In Round 10, Sutherland’s Second Grade side had collapsed for only 46 against Manly, so it probably wasn’t the greatest shock when, the following week, they slumped to 6-28 against Easts.  Chris Thompsett did most of the early damage for the Dolphins, and after Hayden Lindsay and Kieran Weatherall restored some dignity with a partnership of 79, he struck again as Sutherland lost the next three wickets for a single run.  That brought together Ronak Bedi (Second Grade batting average: 5.6) and Flynn Parker (Second Grade average: 5.9), and not even their team-mates expected the innings to last much longer.  But Bedi (66 not out) cracked 11 boundaries, Parker (26) defended carefully, and the pair added 97 for the last wicket, setting a new club record for Second Grade.  Both players recorded the best scores of their Premier Cricket careers (passing scores they’d made in Fifths), and the result was a decent total of 204.  That looked like a winning score on the second day, when Easts slumped to 9 for 139, still needing 66 to win, but by now you’ll have guessed how this ends.  Samuel Greenland (44 not out) and Sam Heuston (28 not out) calmly put together a last-wicket stand of 68, and Easts walked away with the points.   

Thomas Bermingham was in the game

Northern District has moved up to second place on the Fifth Grade ladder after hammering University of NSW outright, largely through the efforts of Thomas Bermingham, who was on the field for every ball of the match.  Opening the innings, the Trinity Grammar student hit five 6s in his unbeaten 132, as well as which he held five catches behind the stumps and completed three run-outs as the Bees were routed for 107 and 63.  He’ll remember the match more fondly than University of NSW’s Jack Roach, who was out without scoring in both innings – caught by Bermingham both times.

Five Things We Learned from Round 10

It took two thrillers to decide the Little Bash finalists

The conference finals of the Harry Solomons Little Bash couldn’t have been scripted any better – both games were decided on the last possible ball of the day.  The game at University Oval fluctuated wildly, with the bowlers marginally on top for much of the day.  Hugo Ikeda made a spectacular start to the day, when Giovanni DiBartolo swung across the line at his first ball, only to bottom-edge it into the stumps.  Ikeda greeted Eknoor Singh with a leg-side wide, but the next ball was slapped to point, where Dylan Hunter held the catch.  Matt Day kickstarted the innings with some meaty drives and pulls that helped Blacktown reach 2-47 in the Powerplay, but the University spinners strangled the batsmen in the middle overs: Dylan Hunter snared 3-13 from four thoughtful overs while Devlin Malone was even meaner, taking 1-10 from his four.  At 5-66, Blacktown seemed unlikely to post a competitive score, but Lancashire bowler Jack Blatherwick hit a ferocious 52 from 31 balls, with six massive 6s.  The University innings followed a similar pattern: Charlie Dummer gave his side a rapid start, after which wickets fell in clumps and the spinners proved hard to get away.  Left-armer Puru Gaur was excellent, taking 2-8 from his four nagging overs.  When Caelan Maladay was dismissed at 7-94, Blacktown seemed to be in charge.  But Ryan McElduff kept his composure, working the ball around and picking the right one to hit, while Devlin Malone swung hard whenever the quicker bowlers gave him room to free his arms.  34 were needed from the last three overs, then 11 from the last.  A single from the second-last ball levelled the scores, and then Malone tapped the ball down into the on-side and scampered through for the decisive single.  McElduff remained unbeaten on 52, and Blacktown was left to wonder what went wrong.

As you’d expect, there were a few more runs scored at Chatswood, where Sydney posted a target of 164, mostly through a bright opening stand between Anthony Mosca and Jacob Bethell.  Tym Crawford was run out in the second over, but Axel Cahlin and Dale McKay (55 from 36) made good progress in the Powerplay, and at 2-87 Gordon looked in control.  Then Nic Bills, hauled out of retirement for the occasion, grabbed two critical wickets, and the required rate began to rise.  When the final over began, Gordon had reached 6-152, needing 13 to win.  It was a chaotic final over, delivered by Harry Manenti, including two run outs, a catch, a boundary and three wides.  Quincy Titterton needed four from the last ball to win the game, but failed to make contact and the batsmen could only run through for a bye.  Sydney were the Sixers Champions by two runs, and host the grand final at Drummoyne on Sunday.

Sams plus Chatswood equals runs

Two themes have run through Five Things this season: that Chatswood Oval is a road, and that Anthony Sams is in good nick.  Guess what happens when Sams plays at Chatswood?  Gordon posted a total of 7-260 on Saturday, mostly through James Newton (63 not out) and Tym Crawford (54).  Anywhere else, that’s a solid score: on Chatswood, it looked slightly under par, and so it proved.  Chatswood had a glimmer of a chance when RPs lost their second wicket at 34 in the sixth over, but Sams and Riley Ayre grabbed the game by the scruff of the neck and put together an unbroken stand of 228.  Sams seems to have reduced batting to a simple formula this season: someone bowls a ball to him, and he whacks it.  He seems to whack the short ones further than the fuller ones, but they all get whacked.  At one point on Saturday, he whacked Quincy Titterton for four 4s in succession.  He finished on 134 from 119 balls, going past 700 runs in all formats this season. 

It's Green Shield time

Green Shield is a tremendous competition: it’s an uncynical place where dreams are still intact and no one worries about whether that scratchy 21 is enough for you to keep your place in Third Grade.  The last round before the finals is played tomorrow, and Parramatta maintained its unbeaten record in Round 6 by beating Mosman, who were previously unbeaten.  Parramatta’s win was built upon a bright innings of 92 by Advith Borredy, who has been phenomenally consistent, with 67 against Bankstown, 62 against University of NSW, 34 against North Sydney, 53 against Blacktown and 84 not out against Wests.  Not everyone in the competition looks quite as ready for Premier cricket, although the kid from Mosman who already has his mullet and moustache in place looks set for a lively circuiting career.

Penrith looks threatening

The Panthers may only be ninth on the First Grade table, but their recent form is excellent, and the team seems to be operating highly efficiently at the right end of the season.  They took Easts apart on the weekend: Hunar Verma collected a couple of early wickets, and then Liam Doddrell (6-31) swept through the innings with a lively, accurate spell.  Then the batsmen chased down a modest target inside 24 overs, Brent Williams completing the game by cracking Marcus Atallah for six.  Penrith has now strung together three impressive wins in succession, and it would be no surprise if they were to win through to the finals.

The Bears are back on track

Is UTS North Sydney out of its mid-season slump?  A strong win over Hawkesbury returned the Bears to the top six and suggested that they may be ready to correct a slump that led to three defeats in succession and spoiled their very promising start to the season.  James Greenslade (59), Tom Jagot (51) and James Rew (46) laid the foundation for a competitive total, which was ably defended by Ollie Knight (5-48) and the tireless veteran Robbie Aitken, who claimed 2-34 from ten cunning overs.    North Sydney is about to lose the services of Rew, the Somerset keeper-batsman, who has performed strongly this season but has been called up to the England under-19 side whose Australian tour begins later this month.

Five Things We Learned from Round Nine

Sydney University enjoys being in a corner

At the risk of getting repetitive, Sydney University continues to demonstrate its knack of winning games from tough positions.  For lengthy stretches of the game on Saturday, the Students were outplayed by Parramatta – like when Patrick Xie and Nick Bertus added 104 for the third wicket in quick time, or when Evan Pitt reduced the home side to 3-18, knocking the top off the innings with some impressive away-swing bowling.  But, most of the time, University finds someone to stand up.  On this occasion, Jordan Gauci and Ryan McElduff rebuilt the innings with a brisk partnership of 84, Charlie Litchfield boosted the run-rate with a middle-order cameo, and two bowlers with modest batting credentials – Caelan Maladay and Devlin Malone – saw the side home with some well-aimed blows at the death, including the second six of Malone’s First Grade career.  The win keeps University in second place on the ladder, although the number of close results the Students have contested means that they have a worse quotient than Penrith, who are tenth.

Welcome to Sydney, Private Player

If you followed the match between Campbelltown-Camden and Easts on Play HQ, you’ll have noticed that Private Player had a blinder, following a handy spell of bowling with a decisive innings of 97.  Private Player turns out to be Louis Kimber, a 25 year-old from Leicestershire, who bats and bowls off-spin.  Kimber scored his maiden first-class hundred in the last English summer, although that achievement was accomplished in the middle of an absurd run-feast, as Leicestershire replied to Sussex’s 588 by running up 4 for 756.  Anyway, on Saturday, Kimber was impeccable, turning in ten tidy overs to take 2-28 (including the key scalp of Angus Robson, who has also played for Leicestershire), and then dominated his partnership with Toby Flynn-Duncombe, whacking 97 from 90 balls.  Kimber looked set for a raid hundred before he played a weird stroke against his fellow English import, Tom Prest, attempting to drive through cover off the back foot to an off break that was at least a foot outside leg stump.  It didn’t end well.  Still, it was an impressive first appearance and gives a further boost to the Ghosts’ mid-season improvement.

Everyone wants to be club captain at St George now

Club captain at St George is a big job – so big, apparently, that it needs two people to do it.  This year, it’s shared by First Grade all-rounder Luke Bartier and Third Grade seamer Paul Francis, both of whom have good reason to remember Round Nine fondly.  At Manly Oval, early wickets to Nick Stapleton had put Manly on the back foot before the home side recovered to 2-64, with Jack Edwards blasting sixes all around the ground.  At which point, Bartier came into the attack, and everything went pear-shaped.  With his first ball, he had Edwards, driving expansively, caught behind (for 57 off 29).  In his second over, Matt Brewster wafted at a ball outside off stump, and nicked off to Tom Vane-Tempest.  And the wickets kept falling – from 6.1 overs, Bartier collected 6-11.  St George tumbled over the line to take the points, although Mickey Edwards was outstanding, taking 5-19.  In Third Grade, Bartier’s co-captain did even better.  Defending 173, he came on to bowl as first change with Manly at 1-25 and grabbed 8-26 in only eight overs.  He took eight consecutive wickets, including Ellis Raymond, Dominic Wheeler and Sam Webber in a single over.  What’s striking about these two performances is not only that they came at the expense of Manly teams at the top of each competition table, but that they both came out of nowhere: in First Grade this season, Bartier had bowled only a handful of overs for his two wickets, while Francis has been no more than steady in Thirds (and took only ten wickets in the whole of last season). 

RPs are clinical when it all clicks

Congratulations to Ben Montedoro, who made his First Grade debut for Randwick-Petersham last week, on the back of several solid all-round contributions in Seconds.  We mention this partly because he’s earned it, and partly because, otherwise, you might not have noticed he was there – he didn’t get a chance to bat or bowl as RPs crushed Sydney in an impressively clinical display.  The seamers were relentless, suffocating Sydney’s top order, and then the classy Tawanda Muyeye (90 not out) and the ridiculously consistent Anthony Sams (65 not out) cruised past the target of 199 with more than six overs to spare.  On their day, RPs can beat any side in the competition, which makes their current standing – 13th – difficult to understand.

That competition you’ve forgotten about is nearly over

If you’ve forgotten that there’s a competition called the First Grade Limited Overs Cup, all is forgiven.  Everyone else has, too.  But it exists, and next Saturday’s round is the last before the Qualifying Finals on 29 January.  As far as we can tell (and we’re relying on PlayHQ, so we could very well be wrong), thirteen clubs have a mathematical chance of ending up in the top six.  Entertainingly, the top six clubs are all equal on points and separated only by quotient: Northern District, St George, University of NSW, Campbelltown-Camden, Sydney University and Blacktown all go into the final round needing only to win to reach the finals.  Behind them, on 13, sit Parramatta, Penrith and Sydney, while (on 12) Sutherland, Bankstown, Wests and Mosman need a gigantic bonus-point win to have a chance.  The big match-ups are at Hurstville, where the loser of Sydney University and St George risks dropping out of the top six; at Asquith, where Sydney has a chance of upsetting the leaders, Northern District; and at David Phillips, where University of NSW and Parramtta meet in what could become a straight playoff for a finals place.

Five Things We Learned from Round Eight

The silly season evens things up

Several clubs fielded unfamiliar-looking sides last weekend, as they struggled to cope with the loss of players to the Big Bash and the interstate under-19 carnival.  And that contributed to a number of upset results around Sydney.  Blacktown beat Randwick-Petersham; Wests defended a small total against Northern District; Fairfield lost only one wicket in beating North Sydney; University of NSW crushed Mosman.  None of these results was easily predictable, and together they have created a remarkably close competition table: only three points separate fourth place (University of NSW) from ninth (Bankstown).  It’s too early to say that the premiers, Mosman, can’t reach the top six: it’s true that they sit in eleventh place, but they’re only a bonus-point win away from the top six.  Many teams will still be scrambled in Round 9, on 7 January, and it’s likely that we’ll be no closer then to having a settled top six.

Wests upset the odds at Asquith

Possibly the biggest upset of the round was at Asquith, where Northern District needed to win at home against Wests to move up from third to second, and you would have backed them to do it when Ross Pawson struck four times in his first few overs, reducing the Magpies to 3-11 and then 4-26.  But the back-up seamers were less penetrative, Liam Sparke dug in for a dogged 58, and Ollie Hing (against his old club) and Mohammad Irfan milked some handy runs from the spinners.  9 for 177 was certainly a recovery, but it looked a long way short of a challenging target, especially as Scott Rodgie made a lively start.  At 1-65, Northern District was strolling towards the points.  But Hanno Jacobs removed Rodgie and David Lowery in quick succession, and Wests built the pressure with tight bowling and keen fielding.  One decent partnership would have been enough to get the Rangers over the line, but Tom Brooks and Josh Clarke prevented that by picking up wickets at regular intervals.  With ten overs to go, Northern District needed just 33 runs with four wickets in hand, but then Pawson was stumped aiming to hit Brooks into some distant part of Hornsby, and in the next over Mitchell Crayn tried to dab Irfan to third man, but only got the ball as far as Hing’s gloves.  There were two overs remaining when Ben Randall miscued Clarke to mid-on, and the entire Wests team engulfed the catcher, Arnav Raina, in celebration.

Harry Manenti is the centre of the action

It shouldn’t be possible to take four wickets and score 110 not out from 111 in a 50-over game, and lose.  Harry Manenti did it.  Then again, has any First Grader ever been involved in the run-outs of five of his partners in a single innings?  Harry Manenti did it.  He was the pick of Sydney’s bowlers against Easts, but a positive 76 from opener Nicholas Taylor lifted the Dolphins to 7-249.  That target wasn’t beyond Sydney’s capabilities, but no-one stayed quite long enough with Manenti, mostly because they kept getting run out.  Matt Rodgers was the first, failing to beat Taylor’s return to Max Glen; Beau McClintock was then involved in a horrendous “yes-no-sorry” mixup, wondering whether to attempt a second run after a blooped pull shot at Sam Skelly.  Alex Glendenning was run out by the length of the pitch when he turned to complete a second run only to find that Manenti had never left his crease; Kain Anderson was also run out trying for a second, but failing to beat Skelly’s return. Fittingly, the game ended when Craig DiBlasio became the fifth player run out in the Tigers’ innings.  All that chaos rather overshadowed two excellent performances: Manenti’s innings, which included some sweetly timed drives and four muscular sixes, and a miserly spell from Jono Cook, who applied the brakes on Sydney’s middle order.

Arjun Nair prevailed in the batfest

The match between Fairfield-Liverpool and UTS North Sydney can be summed up in a single stat: Arjun Nair 5-23, every other bowler 5-445.  The Rosedale pitch was so flat – and the Fairfield batting so good – that North Sydney didn’t claim its first wicket until 212 runs were on the board, when Jaydyn Simmons was stumped for 95.  Yuvraj Sharma batted through the innings for an unbeaten 131, but Fairfield didn’t accelerate as they might have, and a total of 1-253 was good without being out of reach.  James Rew batted brightly in the Powerplay, Tim Reynolds hit some powerful strokes, and North Sydney might have claimed the points but for Nair’s cunning and control.  Nair has developed an unusual method by which he holds his bowling arm behind his back as he approaches the batsman; whether this is designed to keep his action under control, or as some deceptive manoeuvre, isn’t clear, but it was certainly effective on Saturday. 

Bowler’s name?

Northern District at least gave Wests a touch-up in Fifth Grade, although it wasn’t the fault of Wests’ opening bowler, who took 2-40 and scored a defiant 17.  His name?  According to PlayHQ (so who can really be sure?), it’s Veeravenkataganeshsivakrishna Prasad Gandham, which we are announcing (on the basis of absolutely no research at all) as the longest name in Premier Cricket since the days of the legendary Redfern medium pacer John Elicius Benedict Bernard Placid Quirk Carrington Dwyer.

Five Things We learned from Round Seven

The Students keep finding ways to win

Last week we discussed Sydney University’s ability to win matches from unpromising situations.  Exhibit B is now last weekend’s match with Fairfield-Liverpool, and a team certainly knows it’s in an unpromising situation when it finds itself relying on Caelan Maladay’s batting.  Before Saturday, from 59 games in First Grade, Maladay had achieved a highest score of 17 and a batting average of exactly 7.  So when he went to the crease with the score at 7 for 140, Fairfield had some justification for feeling confident.  But Maladay blocked, nudged, edged, poked and generally refused to get out.  He even latched on to a full delivery from Arjun Nair and cracked it through long-on for four.  He reached 21 before spooning left-arm spinner Cameron Frendo to long-off, and his partnership with Tim Cummins lifted University to a total of 191 which, though below par, was at least defendable.  Fairfield’s openers made a lightning start, ripping 33 runs from the first four overs of their innings.  But then Rex Greaves, with his first delivery, removed Brock Fitton with the help of a sharp, low catch by Cummins.  Greaves and the spinners, Devlin Malone and Dylan Hunter, applied the brakes on the middle order, and Kieran Tate (3-39) and Caelan Maladay (2-39) took wickets at regular intervals, so that Fairfield was bowled out 42 runs short of its target.  Despite the importance of Maladay’s contribution, the clear player of the match was University captain Cummins, who held his side’s innings together with an unbeaten 62 (during which he passed 5000 runs in First Grade), before completing five dismissals behind the stumps.  It was the third time in Cummins’ First Grade career that he’s scored fifty or more as well as dismissing five batsmen in an innings.

Sutherland are nobody’s pushovers

In a round full of upsets, perhaps the biggest surprise was Sutherland not just beating, but thumping, UTS North Sydney.  The Bears went into the game 18 places above the Sharks on the ladder, and that didn’t seem likely to change when Sutherland prodigy Sam Konstas slapped the second legitimate ball of the day straight to cover (leaving him stranded on 902 runs for Sutherland before Christmas).  But Jarryd Biviano remains a very dangerous white-ball batsman, and with good support from Englishman Jack Leaning, he launched a highly successful counter-attack.   Leaning fell just short of his fifty, hitting a return catch to Mac Jenkins, but Biviano played so well that his 109 came from only 101 deliveries, with 10 fours and three sixes.  It was his eighth First Grade century for Sutherland.  Set a target of 269, North Sydney was pegged back by early wickets from Andrew Ritchie and Liam Hehir, and while James Rew, James Greenslade and Tim Reynolds all made solid starts, the Bears never caught up with the run rate they needed.  Tom Straker bowled accurately and thoughtfully and cashed in one some desperate strokes late in the day, returning the best figures (4-22) of his short First Grade career so far.  The win still leaves the young Sutherland side propping up the bottom of the competition table, but it also sends a signal that they can’t be taken lightly.

There are two theories about Ryan O’Beirne’s performance against Manly on the weekend.

First theory: he had a shocker.  Easts lost by 80 runs, and O’Beirne’s ten overs were plundered for 81 runs.  He bowled eleven wides (some of which were very, very wide) and a no-ball, so he personally donated two extra overs to Manly.  His first over was an 11-baller.  Also, he could use a haircut.

Second theory: he had a blinder.  He took five wickets, all good ones, in only ten overs.  He produced sharp bounce and went past the bat several times.  Also, he hit 26 not out from only 23 balls.  What more do you want?

Luke Webb can be a handful

It’s probably not unfair to say that Campbelltown’s left-armer Luke Webb isn’t the first player who springs to mind when people talk about new-ball bowlers in Sydney (if that’s something people actually do).  And yet, and yet… every so often, Webb has a day when the ball swings late for him, and he suddenly becomes a very difficult proposition.  He had one of those days on Saturday.  Campbelltown was defending a solid score of 7-224, built around Nick Appleton’s 76.  But Webb scuttled St George’s reply almost before it began.  In his first over, Nicholas Stapleton clipped an inducker off his pads straight to Jackson Isakka behind square; Luke Bartier was surprised by bounce and nicked off to slip; Kaleb Phillips shouldered arms to his first ball, only to watch an inswinger clatter back his off stump.  St George at that point were 3-4, and Webb had 3-2.  Tom Vane-Tempest prevented the hat-trick, but Webb ended the day with 4-33, and the Ghosts took the points by the very comfortable margin of 91 runs.

We have the conference finalists

The conference semi-finals in the Harry Solomons Little Bash produced some unusually fascinating contests.   In the Thunder Conference, Sydney University faced the only team to have beaten them in the shortest format this season – Penrith.  On that occasion, however, Penrith had been turbo-charged by Sam Billings, who is now off on BBL duty, and it was the Students who took control of the game through a belligerent partnership of 116 between Dylan Hunter (63 off 39) and Damien Mortimer (58 off 39).  Tim Cummins (40) faced only 19 balls but hit four of them over the boundary, and Penrith was faced with a tough target of 197.  Tyran Liddiard looked dangerous early on, but was bowled by debutant Hugo Ikeda’s second ball in the top grade.  Ikeda also removed Jordan Watson in his first over, had 3-4 after bowling seven balls, and finished a memorable day with 4-20 as Penrith folded for 119.  Blacktown upset Bankstown thanks to Eknoor Singh’s high-class 97 from 57.  Bankstown had the firepower to chase down 215, but Nic Carruthers was run out second ball, and when Ryan Felsch fell for 36 off 19, Blacktown took complete control.  It probably wasn’t an upset that Sydney defeated St George, but it was certainly a surprise that the Tigers defended a total of only 134.  Alex Glendenning knocked the top off the innings, and the Saints middle order subsided to Craig Di Blasio’s left arm darts.  And at Coogee, Gordon outbatted title-holders Randwick-Petersham, blasting 4-221 thanks to Dale McKay’s 99 not out from 53 and Tym Crawford who, despite an injury that prevented him from bowling, whacked 89 from 43.  Early wickets to Ben Parsons (4-23) reduced Randwick-Petersham to 6 for 59, after which Ben Mitchell (67) and Ashley Burton (55 not out) saved face, but not the game.  The conference finals will be held on 15 January.

Five Things We Learned from Round Six (and one shameless plug)

The Students win the tight ones

Teams that reach the finals generally win matches that they shouldn’t.  Sydney University has shown that knack more than once this season, and pulled off another escape act on Saturday, defeating Randwick-Petersham in a gripping finish by just 11 runs.  The Students produced a limp performance with the bat on the first day, struggling to reach 183.  Dylan Hunter, who’s in the form of his life, mixed dogged defence with some fierce strokes to remain unbeaten on 66, but Jason Ralston and Daya Singh sliced through the lower order, and it took a few improbable runs from Devlin Malone to lift the total to something defendable.  Randwick-Petersham batted slowly but steadily to be 1 for 47 overnight – 137 needed with nine wickets in hand, which, since three of the top five had experience of first-class cricket, looked like an undemanding chase.  But Caelan Malady was excellent on the second morning, removing Ashley Burton and then taking the crucial wicket of Riley Ayre.  Kieran Tate held a sharp return catch from Cam Hawkins, and at 4 for 57, the game was wide open.  Anthony Sams and Tawanda Muyeye steadied things for a while, but Muyeye hasn’t seen all that much leg spin in Kent, and he nicked a tentative back-foot push at Malone into the safe hands of Tim Cummins.  Then Angus McTaggart thrust his pad out to a straight one, and at six for 85 the Students were on top.  Everything rested on Anthony Sams, who responded magnificently, shepherding the tail and punishing anything loose.  Ben Mitchell played calmly for a while, but Maladay returned to remove him and Ralston.  With twelve runs needed for the win, Sams slapped Malone to cover, where Charles Litchfield held a sharp catch diving to his left.  The result left University in third spot, and Randwick-Petersham 12th, though that’s certainly not a true indication of the gap between the sides.  Incidentally, it’s possible to argue that University won because its ex-RPs players (Hunter and Maladay, 4-50) did better than RPs ex-University players (Hawkins, 28 and Mitchell, 24).

More than one highway runs through Chatswood

In its last two home games, Gordon has scored 408 and 412.  At different points in these games, its score has reached 6 for 342 and 2 for 313.  It has lost both games.  It’s ridiculous. 

Chatswood Oval has never had long boundaries, especially square of the wicket, and this season the pitch and outfield could easily be cut out and relaid onto the nearby Pacific Highway.  While Jack James and Tym Crawford were building their excellent partnership of 223 against Easts last Saturday, every defensive push that beat the field went for four.  Of course, as long as the conditions are the same for each side, there’s no unfairness, but some ridiculous statistics are being compiled.  In Easts’ colossal innings of 463, Will Simpson converted his maiden First Grade century into a massive 174, while Englishman Oliver Cox announced his arrival with 116 and opener Blake Harper notched his first half-century in Firsts.  Cox struck a crucial blow on the second day when he removed Crawford during a short spell bowling comically harmless leg-breaks, but the game was decided by Sam Skelly, whose hostile late overs, combined with scoreboard pressure, swung the game in favour of the Dolphins.  Yet again the sympathy vote goes to Tym Crawford: in his last three games, he’s scored 66, 53 and 144, as well as taking 5-55, and lost each time.  It’s not an especially fair game.

Manly seems untroubled by its late start

Speaking of things that make no sense, Manly now has an 8-point lead on top of the First Grade ladder – despite the fact that, because of rain, the team didn’t even make it on to the ground in Rounds 1 and 2.  The seasiders have won their last two games outright (and actually came close to winning another outright against Blacktown).  The match against Mosman was closer than that makes it sound: Mosman began the game strongly, reaching one for 95, before collapsing horribly to be all out for 140.  Ryan Hadley, maintaining a lively pace and attacking the stumps, did almost all the damage, ending up with 8-48.  Manly made heavy weather of the chase, struggling to 7 for 108 at stumps.  But Hadley was in no mood to lose, and last Saturday he added some vital runs in company with Ollie Davies, who returned from State duty for the second day.  Elijah Eales bowled well for his 5-57, but Manly led by 14 on the first innings.  Mosman then batted positively in an effort to set Manly a target, but were reined in again by Hadley, who finished up with a remarkable 14 wickets in the match.  In the context of the game, a target of 186 looked challenging, but Manly ran it down in less than 22 overs.  Ollie Davies and Jay Lenton started with a brutal assault on the new ball, and then Joel Davies saw the chase through with an unbeaten 78 from 49.   The reigning premiers now find themselves in eleventh place and with plenty of work to do.

We have our first finalists

The first eight finalists of the season were decided on Sunday, in the last of the preliminary rounds of the Harry Solomons Little Bash.  St George, Gordon, Sydney and Manly will play in the semi-finals of the Sixers Conference, while in the Thunder Conference, Bankstown, Sydney University, Penrith and Blacktown go through.  Sydney University sealed its place with a thumping win over Parramatta: Dylan Hunter followed a career-best 4-25 with an astonishing 54 from 28 balls, including a lost ball which – appropriately enough – was last seen bouncing into the Emergency Ward at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.  Hayden Kerr hit the ball just as hard and just as far for 72 from 49, and University ran down its respectable target of 156 with 29 balls to spare.  Bankstown sealed top spot in the conference with a close win over Wests, driven by Nick Carruthers’ extraordinary innings: in pursuit of 121, he belted 77 from 33 balls, 70 of them in boundaries, while eight of his team-mates managed 36 runs between them.  The closest game of the Sixers Conference was at Waverley Oval, where Waverley needed 16 from Ben Mitchell’s final over.  Mitchell was equal to the task, however, and Tom Coady failed even to make contact with any of the first three balls.  Even though the left-hander smacked 12 runs from the last three deliveries, by then the game was out of reach.

Bowling in Third Grade is not much fun just now

There have been some unusually tall scores in Third Grade this season, culminating in an absolute run feast at Birchgrove Oval.  Sydney took first use of a faultless pitch and ran up the little matter of 2 for 419 (from only 72 overs) on the first day of its game against Blacktown.  Opener Henry Kirk led the way with an unbeaten 210, made from only 209 balls, with 28 fours and four 6s.  Kirk, who started out with Northern District, has had an odd career with Sydney: he had already made hundreds in Seconds and Thirds for the club, but has tended to mix very large scores with rather small ones, with not much in between.  Anyway, he thoroughly dominated the Blacktown attack, and shared a second wicket stand of 376 with former Western Australian Tyler Robertson, who contributed 169, his first century for the Tigers.  Blacktown couldn’t have been criticised if they’d fallen over on the second day; instead, though, they gave Sydney a real scare, reaching five for 362 before the game ended in a draw.  Opener Remi Ferdinands contributed a hundred of his own, while Hassan Rauf made 89.  Over the two days, seven wickets fell for 781 runs, and no bowler took more than a single wicket.

Nothing says “It’s Christmas” like an obscure cricket history book

Anyone still looking for the perfect gift for that hard-to-please, literate, cricket obsessed relative, could a lot worse than picking up a copy of Black Swan Summer, which is undoubtedly the best book ever to explain the connections between Western Australia’s first Sheffield Shield season, Communism, beer strikes and Sir Laurence Olivier – mostly because it’s the only book ever to attempt it.  You’ll find it in all bookstores where obscure cricket books are sold, or by clicking here and asking Dymocks to send you one.  Or more than one.

Five Things We Learned From Round Five

Nick Larkin is still the big wicket

Sent in to bat by Gordon, Sydney University made an uneventful start against the bowling of Callum Bladen and Quincy Titterton (whose name makes us want to shout “Five points to Gryffindor” every time he takes a wicket).  Then Tym Crawford turned the game on its head, attacking the stumps and grabbing four wickets before lunch to leave the Students in a desperate position.  But Nick Larkin is still the big wicket, and he stood firm, batting all the way through the innings before he was last out, for 183 in a total of 269.  On any other day, Crawford (5-55) would have been the star, but Larkin’s innings was ridiculously dominant, mixing calm defence with brutally effective strokeplay.  He was at his best in the late stages of the innings, when he protected the tail, monopolising the strike, but still managed to take ten runs an over from the Gordon spinners.  He struck 23 fours and seven 6s – 134 runs in boundaries, many of them with ferocious pull shots: he was ruthless against anything short.  And it turned out to be a match-winning innings.  Spare a thought for Tym Crawford, who really didn’t deserve to lose: midway through the second afternoon, he had followed his five wickets with a fifty and his side needed 69 to win with seven wickets in hand.  Then Kieran Tate and the unavoidable Devlin Malone triggered a collapse in which six wickets tumbled for 13 runs.   University’s second-highest scorer made 24; its best bowler conceded 124 runs, yet the Students won.  It wasn’t the most logical of games.  (Titterton, incidentally, finished the game without a wicket or a run – no points for Gryffindor.) 

Jono Craig-Dobson bats now

If The Grade Cricketer is right, and there’s nothing better than scoring a hundred for a losing team, then Jonathon Craig-Dobson probably had a very noisy circuit on Saturday night.  After 35 matches in First Grade for St George, Craig-Dobson has established himself as a very tidy swing bowler, but his batting has always remained stuck somewhere between “not really an all-rounder” and “sometimes gets a few at number nine”.  Before Saturday, he’d never made it to thirty in First Grade.   But when Arjun Nair bowled Blake Macdonald in the first over of St George’s innings, Craig-Dobson was sent in as nightwatchman.  He completed the first part of his task, remaining unbeaten on 7 overnight, and when play resumed he helped Matthew Hopkins add 64 for the second wicket.  Nair struck again to remove Hopkins, but still Craig-Dobson stuck around, carrying the score to 2 for 152 in partnership with Nick Stapleton.  It wasn’t a flashy innings: he was solid in defence, left the ball alone when he could, played some punchy drives and displayed a left-hander’s preference for flicking the ball through midwicket.  Fairfield, defending only 249, looked out of the contest before Nair and Yuvraj Sharma grabbed three quick wickets, St George’s top order collapsing around the unlikely figure of Craig-Dobson.  With good support from the tail – which used to be him, not long before – Craig-Dobson reached his hundred from 200 deliveries, and kept St George in the game until he fell to a sharp catch at slip.  For the second time in as many games, Nair cleaned up with his off-spin, finishing with 7-63.  The result enabled Fairfield to leapfrog St George into the top six.

That’s probably not the last hundred you’ll see from Sam Konstas

With the greatest of respect to Jono Craig-Dobson, the maiden century with the greater long-term significance was probably the one scored at Pratten Park.  In a perfect world, Sam Konstas might have preferred not to have notched his first First Grade hundred in the second innings, after losing on the first, but he had already top-scored in Sutherland’s first effort, grinding out a stubborn 68 as wickets tumbled around him.  Given the opportunity to bat with greater freedom in the second dig, he crunched 112 from only 104 deliveries.  At times he enjoyed a little luck against Tom Brooks’ leg breaks, but he hit the ball freely and gave his side a glimpse of a chance of stealing a reverse outright win.  Usually, alarm bells go off when a young player turns out for three clubs in as many seasons (Konstas has already played for Easts and St George), but Konstas seems to have the talent, technique and temperament to build a very successful career in the game.  This week he followed his hundred with selection in the NSW Under 19s, so he’s already on his way.

Thursday afternoon cricket was fun

Almost no-one remembers it, but Twenty20 cricket actually began over fifty years ago in England, where several leagues exploited the long summer twilight to play 20-over knockout competitions on weekdays after working hours.  Now the Little Bash has returned T20 cricket to its distant roots, with a round of games played on a Thursday afternoon, giving plenty of supporters a reason to slip out of work a touch early.  Probably the biggest game was at University Oval, where the two unbeaten sides in the Thunder Conference played each other, and Sydney University cruised past Bankstown largely thanks to Nick Larkin’s brutal 70 from 42 balls.  University is all but certain to feature in the finals; but the picture is far less clear in the Sixers Conference, where four sides (St George, Gordon, Sydney and Manly) each share the lead with three wins and a loss.  The pick of the games in the Sixers Conference was at David Phillips, where Manly ran up 165.  University of NSW looked just off the pace against an attack including two former Test bowlers (Stephen O’Keefe and Morne Morkel) and needed 36 from the last three overs.  Good overs by Joel Davies and Jake Carden turned that equation into 26 from the last over, which seemed hopeless – but the Bees got twenty of them, with Hayden McLean swiping Morkel for two sixes.

Mosman has some tough selectors

Last August, Charlie Dunnett made his first appearance for the Hampshire Second XI, against Sussex, scoring 56 before taking 3-31 with his medium-pacers.  He’d already played Minor Counties cricket for Berkshire.  He has a foot on the fringes of the professional game in England. And if that doesn’t scream, “might be worth a try in Fifth Grade”, then what does?  That’s where Mosman put him in Round Four, and Dunnett followed his 6-48 against Blacktown by scoring 100 not out from number seven in the order.  Of course, performances like that sing out “it’s a risk, but let’s see how he goes in Fours”.  And in Fourth Grade last weekend, Dunnett took 3-14 and hit 46.  Obviously Mosman’s selectors are hard to impress: let’s hope Dunnett doesn’t get too complacent about hanging on to his spot in Fourths.

Five Things We Learned from Round Four

Devlin Malone is in decent form

What with Liam Robertson’s retirement, Dugald Holloway’s injury and Charlie Dummer’s holiday, the Sydney University side has rather a different look to it at the moment, but the Students are still finding ways to win – many of which are called Devlin Malone.  Late on the second afternoon at Pratten Park, Western Suburbs looked well placed to challenge University’s target of 363.  Josh Clarke had compiled an outstanding century, and opener Arnav Raina – making his debut – had played impressively to reach 90.  Wests had worked their way up to one for 196 – another 168 needed with nine wickets in hand.  But Rex Greaves and Kieran Tate each grabbed a wicket, and then Malone went to work, taking six of the last seven wickets to fall and ending up with 6-93 to seal the win.  He did even better the following day.  University set Fairfield an imposing target of 212 in the Little Bash, after Damien Mortimer and Dylan Hunter shared a furious third-wicket stand of 171 (the second-highest third wicket partnership in the history of the competition, and University’s highest in T20 cricket for any wicket).  Hunter traumatised Jake Wholahan, moving from 79 to 103 by lashing the off-spinner for four successive sixes in the arc between mid-wicket and long-on.  Any hope Fairfield had of approaching the target was snuffed out in Malone’s first over, when he grabbed two wickets.  After three overs, he had five for five, and although his last over yielded up two singles, his 5-7 remained the cheapest five-wicket haul in the history of the competition.  Malone was Sydney’s leading wicket-taker last season; already this year he has another 25 wickets.  His recent appearance in the NSW Second XI shouldn’t be the last representative match he plays this season.

It was a good week for batting

It took a while, but the sun came out, and Sydney’s batsmen rediscovered how to play two-day cricket.  Round Four was full of tall scores and improbable chases: Gordon came within two strokes of overhauling North Sydney’s 415, and Mosman ran up its highest ever score – 8 for 521 – only for Blacktown to reply with 9 for 385.  Parramatta chased down Campebelltown’s 323, with Ryan Hackney’s 144 trumping 117 from Toby Flynn-Duncombe.  Brent Williams racked up 188 in Penrith’s 8 for 353, but the game ended in a stalemate, Jack Attenborough hitting 85 as University of NSW reached 8 for 312.  In the early rounds, there were plenty of rain-affected draws: in Round Four, there were four draws in First Grade simply because it was too hard to take wickets.

It's a funny game

Weird match of the round was at Asquith Oval, a ground Five Things remembers fondly because, see that red-brick house across the road? – he once hit a ball into it (although he was also hit into the trees at the northern end, so it evens out).  Anyway, Fairfield began the match in dominant fashion, with Brock Fitton and Jaydyn Symmyns (sorry, Simmons) sharing a slow but steady opening stand of 141.  Which is a pretty solid platform, right?  Fitton, formerly of Hawkesbury, compiled his first century in First Grade, a patient 129, while Simmons contributed 62.  After which, everything went pear-shaped.  The first three wickets fell to Ross Pawson and Toby Gray for the addition of just one run, after which Arjun Nair and Luke Ohrynowsky left without scoring.  In fact, after the openers, only keeper Max Farmer reached double figures, and Northern District was set the undemanding target of 230.  Although Corey Miller departed early, David Lowery, Chris Green and Lachlan Shaw carried the score to 2 for 89, at which point only one result looked likely.  But wickets kept falling at regular intervals, usually to Nair’s off-spin, and it was left to the inevitable Scott Rodgie to keep his team in the game.   Rodgie couldn’t be faulted: he built handy partnerships with Ross Pawson and Chad Soper, and steered Northern Districts to within ten runs of victory.  But then Soper shouldered arms to a ball from Nair that was judged to be on target.  Jack Cincotta played three impeccable forward lunges, an unsuccessful leg-side flick, and was then given out lbw when pressing forward again.  Rodgie was left stranded on 89, Nair ended with 5-46, and Fairfield collected the points from a rather irrational game.

Mac Jenkins would like to play Gordon every week, please

After four rounds, UTS North Sydney sits on top of the Premier Cricket ladder, largely thanks to the efforts of all-rounder Mac Jenkins.  Jenkins has been a part of the North Sydney side for just over three seasons, contributing usefully without, it’s fair to say, setting the place on fire.  Before this season, he’d passed fifty only twice in 41 matches, in which he’d taken 41 wickets.  In the first three rounds of this season, he hadn’t taken a wicket.  None of that mattered in the game against Gordon at Chatswood, which he dominated, hitting his first century in First Grade before claiming his first five-wicket haul.  He wasn’t under immense pressure when he went in to bat – the Bears had already reached 3 for 199 – but he played a compact, mature innings in the final session to push his side’s total beyond 400.  Jenkins has a habit of opening the bat face slightly when he drives, so that he hits the ball square, which turned out to be a highly efficient way of finding the shorter boundaries at Chatswood.  But his composure with the ball was impressive.  Axel Cahlin (140), Tym Crawford (66) and James Newton (67) batted so well that Gordon reached 4 for 293, and an upset looked very possible.  But Jenkins – left arm orthodox spin – had Newton caught by James Rew behind the stumps, and the same combination accounted for Smit Doshi two balls later.  To its credit, Gordon never stopped chasing the target, although Jenkins kept on picking up wickets.   When Jenkins took the ball for the 85th over of the innings, the score stood at 8 for 405.  Connor Cook hit a two and a single and then – with the field scattered and not a close fieldsman to be seen – Quincy Titterton inexplicably attempted a reverse sweep, which he feathered through to Rew.  Then Nicholas Toohey spooned his second ball into the air from a leading edge, and Jenkins closed out the game with an acrobatic diving catch from his own bowling.  Jenkins ended the game with 123 not out and 6-114, and if he ever has a better match in First Grade, North Sydney will probably win it by more than seven runs.

The Little Bash is warming up

We’re now three rounds in to the Harry Solomons Little Bash, and the T20 competition is starting to take shape.  The biggest clash on Sunday was at Drummoyne, where Sydney played host to a Manly side stocked with BBL players.  The match began according to script, with Manly holding the hosts to a modest score of 123.  But Manly’s reply was suffocated at birth, with Alex Glendenning and spinner Craig Di Blasio choking the run rate and grabbing early wickets.  Di Blasio bowled the dangerous Jack Edwards; Jay Lenton fell cheaply to Harry Manenti; Oliver Davies and Joel Davies got started and got out.  By the time Jacob Bethell wrapped up the innings with 3-13, Manly had subsided for only 69, giving Sydney top place on the Sixers Conference ladder.  Sydney University shares top place on the Thunder ladder with Bankstown, for whom the in-form Nick Carruthers smashed ten sixes in his 99 from 38 balls against Parramatta.  Ryan Felsch also made a telling contribution, following his 42 from 20 balls with a spell of 3-4.