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.