Premier Cricket is a whole lot closer than the Ashes
Just before the Christmas break, two cricketing contests are slightly past the halfway mark. One of them – the one you watch on TV – is done and dusted. The other couldn’t be closer. Sydney University was about nine inches away from leading the First Grade table at the break, but Darcy Mooney’s run out dropped the Students into fifth place. Easts have surged from nowhere to grab the lead, but if they were to lose their next game (which we’re not necessarily predicting) they could easily drop out of the top six altogether. The gap between first and tenth is only ten points. Most seasons, 54 points (or nine first innings wins) is enough to get you into the finals. Applying that rule of thumb, there are still fourteen teams who could make the playoffs – and that’s before we factor in the usual post-Christmas complications of rain and outrights. It’s as tight a competition as we’ve had for years. Who’ll get through? Don’t ask us. Predictions are for suckers and the Barmy Army.
Damien Mortimer bowls
About an hour into the match between Fairfield-Liverpool and Sydney University, the Students’ captain, Damien Mortimer, decided that the Rosedale pitch was so slow and unfriendly to the quicker bowlers that another option was needed – his own low-trajectory medium pace. One of the stranger entries on his impressive cricketing CV is a spell of five for three in Bankstown’s Fifths a very, very long time ago, but in his first eight seasons with University he bowled only three overs, and in his ninth (last season) he took his one and only wicket for the club. Anyway, the plan looked wobbly when his first two deliveries were hit for four, but then he settled into a nagging line and length and from his next 7.4 overs, he snared three for 28. Nick Carruthers went to a leg-side strangle, Yash Deshmukh was bowled and Jaydyn Simmons was stumped by Tim Cummings. As soon as Mortimer began to take wickets, the Livestream feed turned into the blue screen of death, as if in protest against something strange and unnatural. More expected was Jaydyn Simmons’ continued excellent form – in the end his 100 from 126 balls was the difference between the sides, and Fairfield squeaked home by yet another of the one-run margins we’ve seen this season.
St George is surging
After a patchy start to the competition, St George is now one of three clubs (with Easts and Manly) sitting on top of the table with 44 points. Sydney’s total of 6 for 200 at Hurstville wasn’t bad, exactly, but St George charged past it inside 30 overs. Blake Nikitaras has struggled a bit for NSW this season, but is still a formidable proposition for First Grade bowlers: with Kurtis Patterson happy to play second fiddle, he cracked 106 from the first 17 overs before the first wicket went down. Nikitaras smacked three consecutive boundaries in Louis Kimber’s first over, then cracked the off-spinner high over long-off for six. Most of Nikitaras’ nine sixes went down the ground, although facing spinner Hunter Hall, he swapped his helmet for a white Greg Chappell hat, and pulled a short ball over midwicket. Veteran St George watchers still talk about the opening partnerships of Warren Saunders and Billy Watson, but it’s no disrespect to a proud club tradition to say that Nikitaras and Patterson present bowlers with just as many headaches.
Hawkesbury won the matchup in the mountains
The Penrith and Hawkesbury clubs have one of those odd little brother-big brother relationships, in which they get along perfectly well but really enjoy beating each other. Little brother got up on the weekend, on a day when temperatures reached unpleasant levels in the deep west. Adrian Van den Nieuwboer struck twice in his second over, and when Janbaz Saddhar removed Jordan Watson, the first three Penrith batsmen had all been dismissed without scoring. Usman Qadir suffocated the middle order with his leg-spin, taking 1-16 from his eight overs and in a match reduced to 40 overs a side, Penrith posted 9 for 124. In his last two, limited over, matches the excellent Qadir has taken 4 for 49 from 18 overs. Hawkesbury eased home with five wickets and six overs in hand. It was a happy match for Hawkesbury captain Dale McKay, who went away with a win, a wicket and some handy runs to suggest that his recent run of bad form might be behind him.
The average IQ of the UTS North Sydney club probably rose a few points last week
There aren’t many things in Premier Cricket that you can state with any certainty have never happened before. Here’s one: last Saturday, an Assistant Professor from the Philosophy Department of the University of North Carolina State University turned out for UTS North Sydney in Fifth Grade. Travis McKenna has had a rather unusual cricketing career. He played Green Shield for Sydney University maybe 16 years ago. He was a unique University Green Shield player, being already enrolled as an undergraduate at the time. He had accelerated his high school education to the point where he enrolled as an undergraduate when he was fourteen or so, studying Ancient History, although why anyone would be in such a hurry to study Ancient History remains a puzzle. Then he took degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy and ended up at the University of Pittsburgh undertaking a PhD. While studying, he played in the lower grades for North Sydney, bowling seamers with a windmillish action and batting usefully. Anyway, on Saturday he turned out for UTS North Sydney in Fifths, presumably while on vacation, and picked up two for 22 and two catches in the Bees’ innings of 144. He was then faced with the existential conundrum of what to do when your first two batsmen are dismissed without scoring, which he answered by whacking 30 to help his side to a close-fought, two-wicket victory. In one of his recent papers, he criticises a fellow philosopher for “seeing minimal model explanations as relating special types of models to particular target systems rather than seeing minimal model explanations as looking to explain robust patterns of behavior that are exhibited by a variety of physically diverse systems.” We hope that’s clear. What it means, we think, is that if he’s still around for the next round, you should feel free to engage in robust patterns of behaviour and sledge him. He’ll probably be philosophical about it.