Five Things We Learned from Round 16

Wests’ big week went wrong

It was poised to be a phenomenal week for Western Suburbs – first hosting the grand final of the First Grade Limited Overs competition, then needing only a first innings win over Campbelltown to cruise into the qualifying finals in First Grade. 

It didn’t quite turn out how it was supposed to.  Wests sent Northern District in to bat in the Limited Overs grand final, and bowled well enough early on to justify it.  Jack Bermingham took wickets with successive balls, knocking over Scott Rodgie first ball, while Hanno Jacobs and Muhammad Irfan kept things tidy.  But Lachlan Shaw was dropped twice in the 40s – neither a tough chance – and he took the game away from the Magpies, breaking up Tom Brooks’ line with meaty reverse sweeps and pounding the ball through the leg side.  His 117 from 114 balls was a decisive contribution, and NDs bowlers backed it up to secure what was, in the end, a deceptively comfortable victory.  Wests may well still have been wondering “what if?” when they returned to Pratten Park on Saturday to defend their modest total of 188.  Campbelltown resumed at 28 without loss, but Hanno Jacobs grabbed three wickets in no time at all, Jack Bermingham struck twice, and Campbelltown was soon deep in trouble at 5 for 41.  Brendan Smith (60) and Blake Smith (36) led a recovery but with the score on 139, Brendan’s limp pull at Jack Bermingham lobbed a catch to midwicket and brought Wests back into the game.  In the next over, Blake charged at Tom Brooks, missed and was stumped.  It was 8-143 when Ryan Clark was bowled offering no stroke to a ball from Jacobs that may have seamed back a touch.  Wests then looked back in control, but Thomas Patterson and Luke Meek steered Campbelltown to the points and allowed Randwick-Petersham to jump into the top six.  Wests will still have Seconds and Fourths in the finals, but will feel that things could have been very much better.

Next season, the average height of First Grade players will increase by 3.2cm

Sadly, Round 16 marked the final appearances of two of Sydney’s leading slow bowlers.  At Bensons Lane, Steve O’Keefe worked through 12 wicketless overs as St George made light work of a target of 289.  It was a strangely low-key ending for a career which was played out, largely, before bright lights and big crowds in the BBL.  But it was fitting that it ended more or less where it began – O’Keefe was a Hawkesbury Green Shield player, who worked his way into the Australian Under-19s as a batting all rounder.  His batting probably didn’t quite develop as it might have, but his bowling exceeded expectations. His 6-35 in each innings at Gahunje in February 2017 earned Australia a rare Test win in India, and his 224 first-class wickets for NSW cost only 25 runs each.  More recently, his ability to baffle batsmen with the slowest, nudest deliveries imaginable has enlivened the BBL.  O’Keefe is almost forty, so his retirement doesn’t come as a surprise.  Devlin Malone, though, is not yet 26, so his decision to leave the game to focus on his physiotherapy practice is unexpected.  Like O’Keefe, Malone was a teenaged prodigy, breaking into First Grade at Sutherland at 16 and striking three times in his first over.  He went on to take all ten Sydney University wickets in a Second Grade innings, before joining the Students – so there’s a nice symmetry that he went out last weekend with a win for his second club over his first. In all, he managed 364 First Grade wickets, earned through a combination of accuracy, bounce and variation.  He liked to attack the stumps, and was quick through the air, and perhaps the fact that he didn’t fit the conventional mould of a leg spinner told against him when representative teams were chosen.  A handful of State Second Eleven appearances doesn’t seem like fair recognition for a player who has been the leading spinner in Premier Cricket for several seasons – certainly, many less able slow bowlers have appeared in the BBL over that period.  Anyway, good luck to both – Premier Cricket will be a duller competition without them.

Jason Sangha is back in form

Once Wests stumbled against Campbelltown, Randwick-Petersham needed only first innings points over a depleted University of NSW side – missing the recently-retired Hayden and Brandon McLean – to claim a place in the finals.  That mission turned out to be fairly straightforward.  Predictably enough, the consistently excellent Angus McTaggart did the damage when the Bees batted, grabbing 5-25.  McTaggart, the season’s big improver, now has more than 50 First Grade wickets in this campaign.  But perhaps more importantly, Jason Sangha, who has been out of sorts since Christmas, showed some ominously good form with the bat.  Sangha cracked an unbeaten 130 from only 89 balls, smashing 11 fours and a ridiculous eight sixes.  Four times in his innings, he hit two sixes in an over, and three times he hit two successive balls over the rope.  With McTaggart supplying a cutting edge and Sangha now looking dangerous again, Randwick-Petersham can’t be underestimated in the finals.

Parramatta finds ways to win

Of the six sides in the First grade finals, you can argue that Parramatta is the least exciting on paper – sure, they have Ryan Hackney and Nick Bertus, but otherwise they’re a bunch of workmanlike, unglamorous players.  But they’re the reigning premiers for a reason – someone usually finds a way to get their side over the line.  In Round 16, Fairfield cruised to 4 for 189 and looked set for a large total, before Isaac Earl and Michael Sullivan got to work and the last six wickets added only 61 runs.  Then Parramatta found itself in a hole, after Jaydyn Simmons dismissed Hackney and three wickets were down for only 51 runs.  At which point, contrasting innings from Bertus and Patrick Xie steered Parramatta to a comfortable victory.  Bertus hung in for 145 balls for his unbeaten 67; Xie needed only 90 balls for his 102, cracking left-armer Cameron Frendo out of the attack and rushing to his hundred with a flurry of boundaries from Simmons.  Parramatta has a tough assignment against Northern District this weekend, but you wouldn’t bet against them.

It'll do a bit early…

Convinced that the odds of the game are skewed heavily in favour of the batsmen, Five Things loves a collapse, so we couldn’t go past the Fifth Grade match at Don Dawson Oval, where the last-wicket partnership for Parramatta (30, unbroken) was higher than any partnership that Fairfield-Liverpool managed in its two innings of 33 and 44, and was more runs than Fairfield managed from the bat (28) in the first innings.  The second Fairfield innings looked like a scorecard from the under-tens – nine bowlers were used, the best of whom, Aryan Kumar, took four for five from his six overs.  Kudos to Hrehnan Shah who, with 5 and 19, scored a third of his team’s runs.  For everyone else… well, there’s always next season.

Five Things We Learned from Round 15

Four First Grade finalists are settled

Just two Saturdays to go before finals, and the First Grade table remains more or less as it has been since Christmas – the top four is set, and the rest is a mess.  St George, despite its thumping at the hands of Penrith, will still finish as minor premiers even if they all get lost on the way to Benson’s Lane on Saturday (not that we advise this as a strategy, however tempting it may be).  Northern District, Manly and Parramatta will fill the next three, not necessarily in that order.  And then comes the cluster.  Gordon leap-frogged over Wests to sit in fifth with a strong win over Bankstown, featuring the inevitable Tym Crawford century.  They can make their place secure by beating Blacktown.  But Blacktown is in the mix too – if they beat Gordon, and Wests lose to Campbelltown, they’re in the mix.  Randwick-Petersham can make the six by beating University of NSW if other results fall their way.  You can even construct a scenario in which 12th-placed Fairfield beats Parramatta outright, and a whole heap of other sides lose or draw so that they sneak in to sixth.  And that’s before you factor in ties and rain!  But this is Five Things, not 38 implausible conjectures.

There’s another logjam in Seconds

Only three finalists are known for certain in Second Grade.  Bankstown (73) will be minor premiers if they beat Easts (51), unless Manly (71) beat Penrith (52) outright.  Northern District (65) are all but certain to hold their spot in the top three.  Wests sit fourth on 56, but there are no fewer than five teams who could overtake them with just a first-innings win, so they need to make sure they put away Campbelltown.  Sutherland (55) needs to beat Sydney University to remain in the six, and St George (54) needs a win against Hawkesbury.  If any of them stumble, then Parramatta (53) can sneak in with a win against Fairfield.  But St George will be confident after an impressive win over a strong Penrith side, led by Vansh Jani’s 148 from 100 balls, which included 112 runs in boundaries.

Sydney University will play in the finals in Thirds.  Nothing else is certain

A career-best 6-15 by Darcy Manners gave Sydney University a big win over Parramatta last week, and sealed the minor premiership for the Students.  They sit on 81 points, 14 ahead of Manly.  But even on 67 points, Manly is not absolutely certain to play in the finals.  Behind them sit Easts (65), Northern District (63), Parramatta (62), UTS North Sydney (62), St George (61) and Wests (57) – all of whom could potentially overtake Manly (whose quotient, 1.161, leaves it especially vulnerable).  Manly does have the advantage of playing Penrith, who sit dead last with only two wins.  And there’s one critical match-up: UTS North Sydney play Northern District in what looks like a straight shoot-out for a finals place.  If North Sydney loses, it will drop behind Wests if Wests can beat Campbelltown – who are running second-last with only three wins.

You ignore quotients all year, until you don’t…

Coaches like to shout that every run counts.  Well, sometimes every single run does count.  In Fourth Grade this week, fifth-placed Easts (59) plays Bankstown (53), and if Bankstown wins, it could slip past on quotient, where Easts hold a lead (1.402 to 1.387) so slight that it may not be strong enough to survive a loss by anything more than a run or two.  We don’t really do maths here (there’s a reason we don’t go past Five Things), but we calculate that difference in quotient to equal the over-aggressive throw to the bowler’s end that went for four overthrows back in Round Four.  Still, Easts have a couple of highly experienced players in Oliver Maxwell and Jackson Coutts, and pounded University of NSW last week – James Britnell, who opened the season with successive ducks in Fifths, hit a ridiculous ten 6s in his innings of 93.  There may be some jostling over final placings, but Manly (82), Northern District (75) and Wests (74) will all play in the Fourth Grade finals.  Then there are potentially eight teams jostling for the last three places.  Sydney University (60) has clung onto its place in the six for some time, and has a relatively comfortable draw against fourteenth-placed Sutherland (although more than one finals contender has slipped on that kind of banana skin).  St George sits in sixth, and really should see off last-placed Hawkesbury – but if that goes wrong, Gordon (54) and Parramatta (51) still have a hope.

Manly looks hard to beat in Fifths

Manly are your Fifth Grade minor premiers, having already earned a highly impressive 89 points.  Also safely into the finals are Parramatta (78) and Easts (71), while it would take a series of freak events to displace Gordon (67).  Eighth-placed Wests (53) need an outright win over Campbelltown and another series of freak results, which could include seventh-placed St George losing to last-placed Hawkesbury.  Wests are horribly unlucky – they didn’t get onto the field at all last week, when they would have expected to beat 19th-placed Blacktown.  Essentially, Sydney University (61) and UTS North Sydney (60) face an identical challenge – win and you’re in.  North Sydney’s batting has been unconvincing lately, but a decent attack, steered around by the experienced Patrick Lindsay, usually keeps them in the context. 

Five Things We Learned from Round 14

Mosman’s weekend didn’t work out as planned

With two rounds to go, the composition if the top six is… still nowhere near clear.  Mosman had a chance to cement its place in the six when it played Bankstown, and chose to bat first at Bankstown Oval.  But it took Ryan Felsch only two balls to remove Matthew Calder, after which the Whales fell in a heap.  Nick Browne stood firm for 52 overs, remaining 40 not out, but his team-mates gathered six ducks between them as Mosman was bundled out for only 75.  There was no way back from there, and Bankstown completed the outright win with eight wickets in hand.  Mosman’s next match, against Manly, suddenly looks very important indeed.

Wests had a big weekend

Wests, on the other hand, romped to a big win over Eastern Suburbs, jumping over Mosman to take fifth spot.  And the Magpies also advanced to the final of the Limited Overs Cup.  Yes, it’s still going.  Usually, the First Grade Limited Overs Cup is either compellingly interesting, if your club is still in it, or a bit irrelevant, if you’ve been knocked out.  But there was plenty of interest in Wests’ semi-final last Sunday, because they showed that St George can be beaten.  Muhammad Irfan played a key role, removing Matt Rodgers, Ed Pollock and Blake Macdonald in his first spell to reduce St George to 3 for 26.  Kurtis Patterson (87) and Nick Stapleton (85) then rebuilt the innings with a fourth-wicket stand of 172, which seemed to put their side back on top.  But Irfan (5-32) and Hanno Jacobs (3-41) bowled exceptionally well at the back end of the innings, and the St George total of 239 was a little short of par.  James Psarakis held the chase together with an unbeaten 77, but there was an agonising break for rain when Wests needed 27 from seven overs, with three wickets in hand.  When play resumed,  it took a flurry of late blows from Irfan, whose 32 not out occupied only 31 deliveries, to get Wests over the line.  Irfan, who has long levers and an idiosyncratic technique, hit successive boundaries to complete a memorable match for him and a perfect weekend for his club.  With two rounds remaining, Wests has one grand final appearance (against Northern District) booked, and all five grades are still able to reach the finals.

Smit Raval spoiled the fun for Randwick-Petersham

Needing to win to keep up with the top six, Randwick-Petersham couldn’t have asked for a better start: the increasingly impressive Angus McTaggart (6-31) triggered a collapse that left Blacktown in all sorts of trouble at 8 for 107.  At that point, however, Smit Raval somehow managed to squeeze another 89 runs from the last two wickets, assisted by some incredibly patient blocking by Josh Boyden, who lingered around for 132 balls while scoring 27.  Boyden, a brisk left-armer, was far more entertaining with the ball – he induced Blake Weymouth to prod a catch to Raval at leg slip, and had Jake Egan caught behind with a ball that angled across him.  Jermey Nunan shaped a ball away from Jason Sangha, who edged behind, and at the end of the first day, Randwick-Petersham needed 150 runs with seven wickets in hand.  It didn’t look all that demanding, especially when the score reached 3 for 72, but the introduction of Raval’s leg spin caused immediate chaos.  Ashley Burton, leaning forward, nicked another catch to keeper Gus Small; Riley Ayre was lbw, propping forward; and when Cam Hawkins, playing back, edged to Matt Day at slip, Raval’s spell had delivered three wickets for only two runs.  Blacktown won by the deceptively wide margin of 62 runs, and join Randwick-Petersham on 37 points, just three points away from sixth place.

Frankie Nicklin is on the way up

Without attracting a great deal of fanfare, Sydney University all-rounder Frankie Nicklin is enjoying the kind of season that suggests she has a very promising future in the game.  A 19 year old first-year university student, Nicklin was the leading wicket-taker in this season’s national Under-19 Championships, and her form in Premier Cricket has been consistently impressive.  Bowling tidy off-breaks with an economical action, Nicklin bowled immaculately against Gordon, taking 5-25 (she actually wrapped up the Gordon innings by taking five for five in her last three overs).  Against Campbelltown-Camden, she set up University’s win with a lively innings of 104, her first century of the season.  Her batting, like her bowling, is neat, correct and well-organised, and she has some fluent off-side strokes.  Nicklin, who has already played once for the NSW Breakers in the WNCL, has been identified as a likely prospect for some time, but her performances this season indicate that she’s ready to step up into representative cricket on a more regular basis.

Next week, the scorer’s opening the bowling

Weird game of the week was at Mike Pawley Oval, where Manly’s table-topping Fifth Grade side took on Parramatta.  Manly found itself struggling for numbers, and so pressed into action its Third Grade manager, Will Gustafson, and its Fourth Grade manager, Noah Vumbaca, neither of who had played for the club this season, or indeed, expected to play.  That didn’t seem very significant when Parramatta subsided to 9 for 132, but Harry Willoughby and Avyukt Iyer then made the game a little interesting by adding another 70 runs for the last wicket.  Parramatta captain Liam Gillies then grabbed five wickets to leave Manly struggling at 9 for 175, still needing 28 and with only the two late recruits to bat.  To begin with, they poked and prodded, picking up the occasional single, but Gustafson and Vumbaca inched closer to the target, and Vumbaca settled the issue by hitting two fours in the 80th over.  So across the two innings, the last wicket added 98 runs for the loss of one wicket, while 18 other wickets fell for 307 runs.  None of which makes a good deal of sense.

Five Things We Learned from Round 13 (and Taylor Swift)

At Five Things, we’re culture snobs who are hopelessly out of touch, but even we noticed that Taylor Swift managed to clean up at the Grammys this week, somehow becoming – simultaneously – the biggest story in American music, sport and politics.  So this week, we surrendered to the strange times we live in, and learned five things from Premier Cricket and Taylor Swift lyrics.  It’s an exercise that would have been a whole lot easier if Grade cricketers broke up with each other a bit more often, but here goes.

Puttin’ someone first only works when you’re in their top five

With three rounds remaining before the finals, there is now a fairly clear top five: St George marching onwards on 74, Northern District on 59, Manly on 51, Parramatta on 49 and Gordon on 40.  The first four of those seem all but certain to play finals cricket: Gordon now plays three teams in the bottom eight, and so it will fancy its chances too.  But as many as nine clubs will feel that they have a shot at the last place.  If Western Suburbs beat Eastern Suburbs next round, they probably end the Dolphins chances; but if Easts win, they jump above Wests on the table.  Mosman can hang on to sixth place by beating a rebuilding Bankstown side, and Randwick-Petersham can keep its hopes alive when it faces up to Blacktown.  Campbelltown Camden is still in the mix, but probably won’t be after this round, when they’re next in line to be beaten up by St George.

When you’re young, you just run, but you come back to what you need

Austin Waugh hit his first century in First Grade last weekend, which feels like a strange thing to write, because he’s been around for so long and was such a bright teenage prospect.  Then he became weary of the game, and needed a break, but now he’s back, apparently playing for fun and without much of the pressure he experienced on his way through the game’s pathways.  He certainly enjoyed himself against UTS North Sydney, picking up a couple of cheap wickets as the Bears were bowled out for 141, then holding the Sutherland innings together after the loss of three early wickets.  Waugh almost ran himself out on 98, racing off for an impossible single before being sent back, but he raised his hundred (from 161 balls) by cutting leg-spinner Nihal Desai for a sharp single, then getting up from his dive to take the overthrow.  Waugh defended watchfully, drove cleanly and cut hard – and then, for good measure, picked up the important wicket of Justin Avendano in the Bears’ second innings.  Another Shark who enjoyed a big match was former Sri Lankan Test off-spinner, Tharindu Kaushal, who scored 58 and picked up eight wickets over two innings.

Knew he was a killer first time that I saw him

It was a pretty good round for debutants.  Manly had slumped to five for 115 when Jordan Daly began his first innings in the top grade.  He survived a first ball appal for lbw, then tapped his next delivery into the off side to scramble a single.  He was a touch lucky early on – a careless waft at Will Salzmann might have gone anywhere, but flew through the slips to the fence.  After that he played more cautiously, until he cashed in during the final session.  The fact that Manly batted into the second day gave him a chance to post a century, but he was given out on 90 when Hunar Verma moved a ball away from him.  He didn’t seem altogether happy with the decision, though that might have been disappointment at getting so close to a rare milestone.  Even so, it was an exceptional start.  Meanwhile, the latest player to join the St George juggernaut is burly off-spinner, Dayle Carew, who returned an impressive 3-26 from 14 overs against Blacktown – not bad for a player who started the season in Fourths.

The world is spinning round

Usually, this is the part of the season when the pitches get greener and the seamers enjoy themselves.  But it was the leg spinners who prospered last weekend.  Western Suburbs’ Tom Brooks solved the season’s biggest puzzle – how to dismiss Tym Crawford at Chatswood before he scores 150 – not just once, but twice.  In the first innings, Brooks drew Crawford forward to defend a leg break that did just enough to clip the outside edge on its way to Josh Clarke at first slip.  In the second innings, Crawford aimed an airy drive at a fuller, higher-flighted ball, and edged to Clarke again.  Brooks ended up with 4-50 and 5-70, although the Magpies’ push for outright points was thwarted by Trystan Kennedy, who remained not out on 91 when time ran out.  At University Oval, Devlin Malone became the fifth-highest First Grade wicket-taker in Sydney University’s long history, taking five of the first six Manly wickets to fall.  He needed only four balls to take his first wicket, trapping Matt Brewster with one that skidded on, and two overs later he turned one past Joel Foster’s defensive prod.  He bowled an excellent, probing over to Jay Lenton, finally beating the left hander with extra bounce, and drawing a leading edge to short cover.  His five-wicket haul was the twelfth of his First Grade career.

I told you I’m not bulletproof.  Now you know.

Daniel Solway has been a colossal figure in Premier Cricket for several years, which is why it’s worth observing that when Parramatta’s Isaac Earl bowled him in Round 13, he recorded his second duck in succession.  This is not a usual occurrence.  Mind you, just as good players can lose form from time to time, they can also rediscover it – as Nick Bertus proved in the same game.  By his own standards, Bertus hasn’t had a particularly good season, but he came through in the clutch against Bankstown, helping his side regroup after the middle order collapsed to Bankstown’s spinners.  Bertus found an unlikely ally in Kyle Thornley, and their ninth-wicket stand of 35 edged Parramatta home for a vital win.  Bertus finished on 87 not out, a reminder that while players like he and Solway may not be bulletproof, nor can they ever be taken lightly.

Also, apparently, the players gonna play, play, play, play, play.  For three more rounds at least.

Five Things We Learned From Round 12

Realistically, there are two finals places to play for

So there are now four rounds to go, but already the shape of the top six is fairly clear.  St George, who have won 11 from 11, will be minor premiers unless every single player in the club tests positive for performance-enhancing substances between now and the end of March.  They’re a ridiculous 15 points clear of Northern District, second on 53, who are also certain to play in the finals.  Manly (45) and Parramatta (43) look pretty secure, because there’s a ten-point gap between Parramatta and seventh-placed Penrith (33).  Gordon (40) and Mosman (37) are potentially vulnerable to a chasing pack that includes Easts (33), Wests (32) and a bunch of teams on 31.  This week, Gordon play Wests, and Mosman plays Penrith – so Penrith has a chance to pass Mosman, and Wests could theoretically (with an outright) pass Gordon.  What complicates things is that all the remaining games are two-dayers (so there are 40 points still available) and it’s going to rain (which always creates the risk that good teams get no points at all).  Next week will shake things up, but the last two spots may not become clear for some time yet.

Nick Larkin still plays

Sydney University came within an over or two of taking first innings points against Bankstown on day one, and it wasn’t entirely coincidental that this was the game in which Nick Larkin returned to the top of the Students’ order.  Larkin has missed several games through a combination of BBL duties, Blues coaching work and parenthood, but if Bankstown were hoping he’d be rusty, they were disappointed.  Bankstown’s total of 139 seemed well under par on a slow and unthreatening pitch: Will Salzmann removed Daniel Solway for a first-ball duck, and the Bulldogs never recovered.  Kieran Tate, Devlin Malone and Harrison May all maintained the pressure, and University was left with 21 overs to bat at the end of the day.  Larkin got things moving by driving Ryan Felsch through cover, before whacking a delivery from Liam Marshall that was only fractionally short to the fence at square leg.  It wasn’t a bad idea to introduce spin early, but Larkin welcomed Kobe Layton into the attack by swiping a boundary through midwicket and launching a full-length ball over the bowler’s head for a straight six.  Larkin raced to 84 from 71 balls, and it took some dogged batting from Bankstown’s lower order on the second day to deprive the Students of full points.

Manly won the Green Shield

The upsets in the Green Shield happened in the semi-finals, when the two highest-placed teams, Northern District and Gordon, were knocked out by Manly and Parramatta.  Manly hosted the final at Manly Oval, batted first, lost a wicket in the first over and struggled to 5 for 110 against some disciplined bowling.  But Miles Milliner, who plays Shires cricket for Warringah, blasted Manly back into the game by taking on the Parramatta spinners.  The left-hander’s 76 came from only 58 balls and included four sixes, either driven straight down the ground, or pulled over midwicket.  Chasing 216, Parramatta was well in contention at 2 for 88, with the excellent Blake Noorbergen well set on 23.  But left arm spinner Myles Kapoor produced an arm ball that scuttled through to bowl Noorbergen, and medium pacer Bill Martin kept a good line and length to profit from some increasingly desperate lower-order slogging.  Martin collected 5-30, and the leg stump yorker with which he took the last wicket gave Manly is first Green Shield success since 1991-92.

Addison won the battle of the Sheriffs

UTS North Sydney all-rounder, Addison Sheriff, had a memorable game against his former club Sydney, which was made a touch spicier by the presence of his brother, Ellis, in the opposition.  Ellis was on top early, grabbing a couple of early wickets as Sydney reduced the Bears to 7 for 111.  But Addison was still there, and he received some sensible support from Olly Knight and Everett Oxenham, with whom he added 137 runs for the next two wickets.  Addison’s game is neat and well-organised, and is largely based on waiting for the right ball to drive, although he also cuts effectively when allowed any width.  He hit seven boundaries in his 111, reaching his first hundred in the top grade by dabbing left-arm spinner Tom Mullen away to third man.  Addison is still only 17, and it will be interesting to see what he does when he adds a touch more power to his game.  The Bears’ bowlers wrapped things up efficiently on the second day, when captain Mac Jenkins knocked over the tail and collected the absurd figures of 4-4.

Harpo was unique

Saddest news of the week was the loss of Neil (“Harpo”) Marks, at the age of 85.  Harpo was an outstanding young batsman, who burst into first-class cricket in 1958-59, scoring 180 not out on his debut for NSW against South Australia.  When he scored 103 in his second game, against Victoria in Melbourne, he was hailed as cricket’s next big star.  But he played only eight more first-class matches: he had a congenital heart defect, which required surgery in the United States, and afterwards he never returned to top-level cricket.  But he never left Northern District.  He scored the first of his 18 centuries for the club in Green Shield in 1951-52, and he remained an outstanding First Grade batsman for twenty years, until he decided to drop down to captain Seconds to help develop the club’s younger players.  His captaincy was a unique combination of fierce competitiveness – he set and demanded high standards – and affability, because he knew everyone in Sydney cricket, everyone knew him, and everyone liked him.  The success that Northern District enjoyed in the 1980s had its roots in Harpo’s Second Grade teams of the 1970s.  He was also an early promoter of the young Mark Taylor.  He became patron of the Northern District club – a devoted one-club man.  There was much more, of course – he was a State selector, a popular writer, an in-demand speaker.  He’ll be missed, and not only at Waitara.

Five Things We Learned from Round 11

New year, same old stuff

We’re a couple of weeks into the new year, which means that most of those earnest resolutions made late on 31 December are now receding into the distance.  Not much has changed in Premier Cricket, either.  On Saturday, St George won and Blake McDonald scored 184.  Chatswood Oval had a road where its pitch should be, and Tym Crawford smashed 164.  It’s just like 2023.

Will Salzmann hits it cleanly

Sydney University went down to Gordon at Chatswood Oval, after the inevitable (but still impressive) Tym Crawford century.  But they went down fighting, thanks in part to an exceptional all-round effort from Will Salzmann, who backed up his four wickets with a spectacular innings.  Opening the Students’ innings with Jack Attenborough, Salzmann played circumspectly for a couple of overs, and then put his foot down.  He hit Quincy Titterton for an off-driven four that was pure timing, pulled a good length ball over mid-wicket for 6 and cracked a free hit over cover for 6 more.  Salzmann was equally brutal when Nick Toohey bowled the sixth over, playing a casual flick off his hip over the backward square fence and cover-driving for 4.  A pull for 4 from Toohey’s bowling brought up his 50 from only 30 balls.  He’d reached 91 from 54 when he sliced a drive at Connor Cook to cover, but it was an exhilarating innings, full of clean hitting and deft timing. 

Baxter Holt is still pretty useful

Just a couple of seasons ago, Baxter Holt was the next big thing for the NSW Blues and Sydney Thunder.  He hasn’t played for either team this season, but he still has impressive credentials as a keeper/batsman, and he bailed Eastern Suburbs out of a hole at North Sydney on Saturday.  The Bears batted first and posted 241 – not a big score at North Sydney Oval, but something of a recovery after Sam Skelly struck twice in his second over.  That included the big wicket of Justin Avendano, caught by Holt without scoring.  But Easts didn’t do much better against the new ball – they lost two for seven, and were then 3-56 when Angus Robson was dismissed.  It took Holt nine balls to get off the mark, but he did it in style, clipping Ollie Knight through mid-wicket for 4, then repeating the stroke to the next delivery.  He then welcomed Harrison Lee-Young to the bowling crease with a sweetly timed cover drive to the fence.  Lee-Young, who has a distinctive, slightly slinging action, made an important breakthrough when Angus Robson top-edged a pull shot straight up in the air, but Holt and Will Simpson settled the game with an unbroken stand of 177 in 31 overs.  Holt was clam, well-organised and unhurried, and ended up unbeaten on 104 from 109 balls.

Sometimes it does a bit early

Anyway, one thing we definitely learned is that if you play at Blacktown International Sports Park, the surface seems to be quite helpful to bowlers with the new ball in hand (as the late, great Alan Davidson used to say, “it’s a bit conducive”).  Mosman played Northern District at Blacktown on Saturday, and it took only three balls for Elijah Eales to remove Cameron Tunks.  After 16 overs, a pretty handy Northern District lineup had crashed to 6 for 48.  Most of that damage was done by St Patrick’s Strathfield schoolboy, Josh Malone, whose haul of 4-20 from ten overs included Scott Rodgie and the in-form Mitchell Crayn.  But former Mosman player Danul Dassanayake steadied the innings, Josh Baker contributed 41 from number ten, and Northern District battled their way to 178.  But what Elijah Eales and Josh Malone can do, Ross Pawson and Jake Cicotta can also do, and Mosman slumped to 5 for 44 in reply.  There was no recovery for the Whales – Cincotta ended up with 5-19, and having been 6-48 early in the game, Northern District won by 70 runs.

There’s still plenty of fight left in Sydney

For quite a while, the game between Penrith and Sydney seemed to be going the way you’d expect.  Penrith, playing for a place in the top six, batted first and racked up five for 283, with Nick Adams hitting 102 and Brent Williams 84.  Sydney, playing for self-respect and to avoid the foot of the ladder, lost its first two wickets to Ryan Fletcher with only seven runs on the board.  So far, so predictable.  But Sydney captain Nathan Doyle wrestled his side back into the contest with a fighting innings of 102 and Sydney looked well placed at 3 for 173.  But Luke Hodges produced a mean spell of slow bowling, picking up three important wickets, and with four overs remaining, Sydney still needed 42 runs with two wickets in hand.  At the crease were Thomas Mullen, who had reached double figures only twice in 14 matches this season, and Ellis Sherriff, who bats behind Thomas Mullen.  The left-handed Mullen began by swishing hopefully at Fletcher, but then started to make contact, clubbing an inelegant slog past mid-on for a couple, and flat-batting a 4 through cover.  36 needed from three overs.  15 came from the 48th over, bowled by Liam Doddrell, including a ridiculous stroke played by Mullen from several feet outside leg stump, that sent the ball to third man for 4, and a nicely-timed pickup from Sherriff over mid-on for six.  The excellent Fletcher pulled things back in the 49th over, allowing only five singles, which meant that 16 runs were needed from Doddrell’s final over.  Mullen, giving himself room, clubbed 4 past point and punched a single to deep cover.  Doddrell bowled a length ball to Sherriff, who slog-swept it over midwicket for 6.  That meant that Sydney wanted five runs from three balls, but Sherriff needed only one of them, picking up a low full toss and swinging it over the boundary for, maybe, the most implausible win of the season so far.

Five Things We Learned from Round 10

There’s a top six starting to form

With this frantic season pausing for two weeks to catch its breath over the new year, the top six in First Grade is slowly taking shape.  Anyone taking odds on who’ll be there will have closed the book on St George, who have opened the season with nine straight wins.  Five Things usually reckons that, to make the finals, a side needs something between 54 and 60 points, which means that St George (on 56) could lose every game between now and March and still have a pretty good chance (although we do not recommend this approach).  Saints are followed by Northern District (41), Mosman (37), Manly (33), Penrith (33) and Parramatta (31).  But Penrith and Parramatta play each other in the next round, and Gordon (28), Easts (27), Wests (26), Fairfield (25) and Randwick-Petersham (25) will be looking to make up ground on whoever loses that one.

McElduff got the Students back on track

Sydney University’s recent slide looked like continuing when the Students slumped to 3 for 22 at North Sydney Oval.  But the Students have found a way to win from tight corners against North Sydney in recent seasons, and Ryan McElduff (88) and Tim Cummins (69) rebuilt the innings with a partnership of 136.  Cummins got off the mark with an effortless cover-drive for 4 off James Campbell, and played with the confident aggression that has marked his batting form this season, which is the most consistent of his career.  McElduff survived a few anxious moments early in his innings, but quickly grew In confidence, playing his trademark flick off the pads, and hitting a sweetly timed back foot drive for 4 against Nic Bills.  He welcomed Everett Oxenham into the attack by thumping the off-spinner over long-off for 6, and cleared the fence again when he swung a short ball from Campbell over backward square.  University’s 9 for 262 proved too steep a target for North Sydney, who lost wickets regularly to the spin combination of Devlin Malone and Andrew Hazard.  Harrison May, making his First Grade debut for the Students against his old club, struck with only his second ball, when Tim Reynolds chipped a catch to mid-on.  May’s attempt to revive the 1980s-style headband is a bold fashion choice but not, we suspect, one that’s likely to catch on.

Ed Pollock went off

The interesting thing about St George’s unbeaten run is that every week they have a different matchwinner.  This time it was Worcestershire batsman Ed Pollock, who made chasing 251 in 50 overs look like a walk in the park, if that walk included bashing everything that came across your path.  Pollock drove his first ball, from Connor McKerr, straight for 4, and barely slowed up after that.  His innings included a few uncertain swishes, but plenty of fluent drives and a number of shots that defy orthodox description, like his short-arm slog-pull for 6 from Josh Baraba.  He greeted seamer Yuva Nishchay with another 6 over midwicket, missed the next two balls, then picked up a full-length ball outside off stump and somehow swept it for six.  The introduction of spin didn’t help: Pollock smashed Cameron Frendo over midwicket, too.  In all, he hit nine 6s while scoring 116 from 58 balls.  At the other end, Kurtis Patterson batted quite beautifully for a run-a-ball 70.  No one noticed.

Andrew Ritchie had a good day

Sutherland’s Andrew Ritchie is the kind of player you think of as a hard working, reliable bowler, rather than the guy who runs through a side.  On Saturday, he ran through a side.  With the very first ball of the match against Blacktown, Ritchie hit the very top of Gus Small’s off stump.  He followed that with a leg-side wide to Eknoor Singh, then nipped the next ball back in to hit the top of leg stump.  In his second over, he beat and bowled Kunj Changela, and won an appeal for lbw against Puru Gaur with his next ball.  At that point he had the absurd figures of 4-2 from 1.4 overs.  He ended with a career-best 6-23, and Sutherland walked away with a bonus-point victory.

Fairfield Fourths missed out on a record

Lower grade records are patchy and kind of a mess, so don’t quote us on this, but Five Things is not aware of any time when a grade team has been bowled out for less than 10.  12, sure.  14, often.  But less than 10?  Not so far as we know. 

Anyway, so Fairfield’s Fourth Grade side missed a unique opportunity to write a new chapter in Premier Cricket history in their match against St George.  Chasing 173, they started well enough, taking three runs from the first two overs.  They then managed to lose seven wickets while adding just three more runs.  There was a run out, then a wicket to the inevitable Steve Wark, and the William Taylor took 5-1 in the space of twenty balls.  At that stage, Fairfield was seven down for six runs, and Taylor had a hand in every wicket to fall, executing the run out and holding a catch, as well as taking his own five wickets.  Slightly disappointingly, Ethan Muller then whacked ten runs from an over from Wark, and so Fairfield (who reached 52) merely lost heavily, when the chance to do something truly historic was on offer.

Five Things We Learned from Round 9

Scott Rodgie ˃ Tym Crawford (this week anyway)

So Tym Crawford hit his third century in a row, this time 119 from 92 balls with five sixes.  And, yes, it was at Chatswood, but that is still very, very impressive.  Except, this week, not quite as impressive as Scott Rodgie, who batted through Northern District’s massive innings of 2 for 352 to hit a career-best, unbeaten 165 from 157 balls.  Rodgie shared a rapid second wicket stand of 206 with Lachlan Shaw, who needed only 78 balls for his 114 – and, in the process, Rodgie took his career tally of First Grade runs beyond 11,000.  To top it off, Rodgie played a role with the ball.  Gordon reached 2 for 193, needing 160 from 20 overs with wickets in hand, Crawford in full flight, and Chatswood’s boundaries not getting any longer.  Rodgie’s medium pacers are no longer as zippy as they once were, but even so he managed to deceive Crawford with a slower ball, who lobbed a catch back to the bowler rather in the way that a batsman in French cricket deliberately taps a catch to a very uncoordinated child.  Just now, Crawford is playing exceptionally well – but, on Saturday, not quite as well as Rodgie.

Country cricket is… different

Congratulations to Wests and Manly for a couple of interesting collaborations this season.  First, there was the Archer Gray Testimonial match, a great cause generously supported by the two clubs.  Then, Wests and Manly took their Round 9 match to the bush, for a day-night encounter at Wade Park in Orange.  It was an exciting contest, won by Wests by just 12 runs – but it was also memorable for a whole heap of reasons you wouldn’t usually expect.  Top scorer for Wests was a batsman who made his first-class debut at the age of 14, and fled Afghanistan after the Taliban killed his father.  Farhan Zakhail hit a vital 54 to boost Wests to a decent total after the middle order struggled against Joel Davies.  Manly’s Lachlan Coyte made his First Grade debut for the club – in his home town, Orange, an event that he can’t possibly have anticipated when he went to play on the peninsula.  In Manly’s innings, the first three batsmen fell to Hanno Jacobs and Muhammad Irfan without scoring and there were three first-ballers in the innings.  Chasing 244, Manly looked dead and buried at 9 for 126, but Thomas Kaye (61 not out) and Josh Seward (58) then inexplicably added 106 for the last wicket, before Josh Clarke lured Seward into one stroke too many.

Jaiveer Singh Dhanoa looks interesting

In a steady, unfussy way, Mosman has climbed back into the top six, winning matches in the way they did en route to a premiership a couple of seasons back.  They had too much experience for Fairfield, winning their encounter at Rosedale by 40 runs.  But the most interesting performance of the day came from Fairfield’s medium pacer, Jaiveer Singh Dhanoa.  Dhanoa played NSW Metropolitan Under-17s last season, and at first glance there’s not much too him.  He’ slightly built, and his run up is so gentle it looks almost apologetic.  There’s nothing very explosive about his release.  And then, just when you start to think that he looks a bit plain, he slips a ball through Nick Browne’s defence, and the middle stump goes flying.  Dhanoa ended up with four wickets – it will be interesting to see how he looks once he’s a touch older and stronger.

Parramatta looks strong again in Green Shield

That annual carnival of fresh-faced enthusiasm, the AW Green Shield, kicked off on Sunday, with Parramatta sending a powerful signal that it will once more be a force in this competition.  Parramatta crushed Gordon by the tidy margin of 241 runs, largely because of a ferocious innings from Blake Noorbergen, who cracked 145 from 114 balls.  Noorbergen, who’s in his third season of Green Shield, had a fairly decent weekend, as he whacked 100 from 103 balls in Third Grade on the Saturday.  Noorbergen looks good – his defence is well-organised, he has a good range of back-foot scoring shots, he scores lots of singles and he punishes anything loose.  Noorbergen’s previous Green Shield innings was a first-ball duck in last year’s final – which Parramatta won anyway.  Their title defence couldn’t have got away to a better start.

Metro Cup is never dull

Five Things doesn’t often go to Metropolitan Cup, but maybe we should, because while the cricket there may be variable in standard, it’s always interesting.  Take Saturday’s game between Penrith and Sutherland at Tonkin.  Sutherland sent Penrith in to bat, and inside the first eight overs, Jack Logan and Joshua Watson reduced Penrith to 5 for 12 – and all of the first five batsmen dismissed failed to score.  But they didn’t remove the number three batsman, Lachlan Hood, who counter-attacked so effectively that he reached 99.  That meant that Penrith’s first six batsmen scored 0, 0, 99, 0, 0 and 0.  There was an equally unusual game at St Andrew’s, where University of NSW failed to bat through its 50 overs, but reached 292 anyway.  Sydney University stumbled to 2 for 31, but stormed home to reach its target with more than three overs to spare.  Most of the damage was done by Tushar Sharma, whose 171 not out included a ridiculous 13 sixes.

Five Things We learned from Round 8

This may not be the best century in which to play a summer game

This was the week in which European Union scientists declared that 2023 has been the hottest year on record.  Apparently, this assessment was made after measuring atmospheric temperature readings and ocean temperature charts, and consulting with Premier Cricket umpires standing west of Parramatta.  On Saturday, two First Grade matches were abandoned when the heat reached unsafe levels, as well as several games in the lower grades.  Easts will feel a touch unlucky, having put in a good stint to limit Blacktown to 7 for 189 and reached 42 without loss in reply.  In the other abandoned game, George Bell, Bankstown’s diminutive import from Lancashire, who usually keeps wicket, had his first experience of bowling in a heatwave and nabbed two Hawkesbury wickets with his off-breaks before the heat became too intense.  Bankstown had the most frustrating round imaginable, with four of its five matches called off early.

And the long term forecast is that January will be hotter…

Tym Crawford likes batting at Chatswood

Liam Doddrell celebrated pretty hard when, in the fourth over of the game between Gordon and Penrith, Louis Bhabra aimed a pull shot at him and looped an easy catch to mid-on.  If he’d known what was coming, he might not have bothered, because then Tym Crawford came in to hit only the third double-century in the history of the First Grade Limited Overs competition.  He actually started off pretty sedately, pushing only three singles from the first six balls he faced.  Then he pulled a shortish ball from Sam Grant away for 4, and he was away.  Any time Penrith dropped short, he rocked onto the back foot to pull, he drove strongly down the ground, and showed unexpectedly deft touch to work the ball through the field.  He reached his fifty, from 47 balls, by lifting left arm spinner Luke Hodges off his pads over square leg from the last ball of the 20th over.  Chatswood, we’re happy to report, is back to being a road again, and Crawford cashed in.  It took him only 38 balls more to reach his hundred, by driving Angus Bayliss to the fence beyond mid-on.  In the 36th over of the innings, Crawford took Hodges apart.  He started with two effortless slog-sweeps for six, then dragged the ball through wide mid-on for 4, and played a neatly-timed clip off his hip for 4 more more.  It’s fair to record that there were no really bad balls in there, and that the last ball of the over beat Crawford outside off stump.  Probably Crawford’s most outrageous stroke was the slash for six over point, from fast left-armer Ryan Fletcher, that took him from 188 to 194.  After a short break while the ball was retrieved, Crawford backed away to give himself room, and smeared the next delivery over cover for another 6, to bring up his double century from 133 balls.  Crawford remained unbeaten on 205, and Gordon won comfortably, by which time most people had forgotten that Jayllen Naganayagam got the whole thing started by smashing 72 inside the first twelve overs.

St George looks ominously strong

St George swept Parramatta aside to win its seventh match from as many starts, and giving notice that they’ll be very, very hard to beat this season.  It’s the strength of their batting that has been intimidating this season – on Saturday, Blake Nikitaras and Blake Macdonald were dismissed fairly cheaply, only for Englishman Ed Pollock to belt four sixes in his unbeaten 82.  Sometimes, it seems as though the attack relies too much on the penetration supplied by Peter Francis, but on Saturday it was the less obviously threatening medium pace of Jono Craig-Dobson that did the damage.  Parramatta began well, with Ryan Hackney and Ben Abbott taking 52 runs from the first eight overs.  But Luke Bartier strangled Hackney down the leg side, and then Craig-Dobson took hold of the match.  In his first three overs, he removed Abbott and Nick Bertus, and he ended the innings with 4-18 from nine miserly overs.  He was well supported by Bartier and the rapidly improving Raf Macmillan.

We have some finalists

The last pool round of Poidevin-Gray was played on Sunday, and Western Suburbs completed its unbeaten streak, defeating Hawkesbury to top its pool.  Captain Harjas Singh, who has been a key part of Wests run, helped his side to navigate a tricky chase with a stylish 56.  While Wests has relied on its steady attack, Northern District has powered its way through the competition with an immensely strong batting lineup, and after slumping to 2 for 15 against Penrith, it recovered to 4 for 349 after Cameron Tunks (102) and Mitchell Crayn (186 not out) shared a third wicket stand of 235.  Wests now play Campbelltown-Campbell in one Thunder Conference semi-final, while Northern District plays Parramatta in the other.  In the Sixers Conference, Gordon plays North Sydney and Manly plays Randwick-Petersham. 

Shoot straight, you bastards

Probably no one much will remember the Fifth Grade match between Sydney University and Mosman at Camperdown.  It was a tight finish, exciting in its way: Sydney University sneaked home by five runs, snatching the last wicket on the fifth ball of the final over.  But that’s not important right now, because the most noteworthy feature of the match was that Mosman’s bowlers sent down no fewer than 48 wides in 45.2 overs – contributing about 22% of the University total of 221, besides donating eight extra overs to the batting side.  If this happened in the BBL, the integrity unit would be working overtime. 

While we’re in Fifths, Wests made the unorthodox move of appointing 17 year old Jack Clark as captain for the match against North Sydney.  Clark’s inexperience was obvious at times (he gave himself only five overs, in defiance of the unwritten law that Fifth Grade captains must bowl as many overs as legally possible), but he saw his side to victory with an unbeaten 47 not out from 39 balls.  Interestingly, in the same round, Wests also fielded the oldest captain in Premier Cricket, Paul Ryan in Thirds, whose age is a closely guarded secret but who is approximately forty years older than Clark.  Has there ever been a greater age gap between two captains on the same day of grade cricket?  Answers by email to Roy Formica.

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.