St George is good at T20 cricket
The start to a new cricket season used to be fairly slow and gentle: not any more. Now it’s frenetic and chaotic. Last weekend, some players were involved in Round One, others in Round Four: the season was eight days old and already there are some players who have played in six matches, and a bunch of others who are already due to play in finals in a couple of Sundays. So it’s comforting that some things don’t change, like St George being up among the leading clubs in First Grade. Actually, St George’s dominance of Pool C of the Kingsgrove Sports T20 was almost ridiculous: it was the only side to win all four games, and it ended up with a net run-rate above three – meaning that in any given 20 overs, it scored three times as many runs as its opponents. Most of this was driven by powerful batting and Powerplay dominance: Sam Heazlett carved out rapid innings of 41 and 58, Reiley Mark smashed 86 from 58 against Sydney University, and Luke Bartier and Lachlan Bangs also contributed half-centuries. The attack is less spectacular, but quietly efficient. They will not be easy to beat.
Everyone gets a prize!
Well, not quite. But more than half the teams in the Kingsgrove Sports T20 get a final. The way the system works, the teams who won each pool advance to the second round of the finals, while the teams that finished second and third play off in the first round. So 12 of the 20 teams stay alive. This leads to outcomes that seem slightly odd, like Sydney and Fairfield appearing in a final after winning one of their four games (with, admittedly, a washout each). In the circumstances, UTS North Sydney must be considered unlucky – it was the only side to win two matches but not advance. And spare a thought for Wests, who broke a long title drought by winning last season’s competition but this year lost three games and had the last washed out. Wests didn’t play all that badly – they pushed Northern District hard at Merrylands – but T20 games leave little margin for error.
Patrick Xie is camera-shy
It was an interesting weekend for Patrick Xie, Sydney University’s captain, who led his side into the T20 finals and twice, once on Saturday and again on Sunday, banged six sixes in a half-century. After the Students had been belted around Hurstville Oval on Saturday morning, they badly needed a win over Sydney down the road at Harold Fraser and, together with Yuvraj Sharma, Xie gave his team exactly the start they needed in the Powerplay. 61 runs came from the first six overs, and when Xie was dismissed in the tenth over, the score had reached 101. Anyway, Xie’s fourth six, clubbed over the short boundary at mid-on, jolted the Livestream camera off its perch, so that for the next couple of hours anyone tuning in to the match was treated to views of the long-on fielder’s boots. Sydney was briefly in the chase as William Fort hammered 59 from 33 but the bowlers who took the pace off the ball – Hayden McCarthy, Damien Mortimer and Bailey Lidgard – kept the rest of the batters in check. That win left the Students in second place in Pool C and they secured a finals spot when they outplayed University of NSW in a soggy 12-over bash on Sunday.
Campbelltown-Camden are in the finals…. just
The close finish of the round – actually the only close finish of the T20 weekend – was at Raby, where Sutherland needed eleven runs from Jeremy Nunan’s last over of the day to beat Campbelltown. Chasing only 131, Sutherland looked dead and buried at 9 for 92, but Will Straker played sensibly while Luke Ritchie hit hard. Six were needed from the final two balls, and Ritchie made pretty good contact with the first of them, only to pick out Nick Appleton at deep mid-wicket. It was a good day for the Ritchies: Andrew took 4-22 in Campbelltown’s innings, in which only Bailey Abela (64 from 50) made any real impact with the bat. Blake Smith and Shazil Malik kept the Sutherland batters in check, and helped the Ghosts through to the first round of the finals.
T20 is for batsmen… and Daya Singh
Most days, T20 is a game for batsmen. Each bowler has only 24 deliveries in which to make an impact on the game, and some matchwinning efforts are unspectacular in conventional terms: a spell of none for 12 in four overs may be the decisive contribution in a high-scoring match. Which makes it all the more remarkable that in this season’s competition so far, Randwick-Petersham’s Daya Singh has taken nine wickets at an average of 2.33. Against Mosman on Saturday, he set up his side’s comfortable win with six for 16 from three overs, the kind of figures you usually see only in the under-tens. Singh maybe isn’t quite as brisk as he was a few years back, but he’s skiddy and hits the bat hard. In two day games, Singh gets a high proportion of his wickets from catches behind the wicket, but this was a white-ball bash, so no fewer than four of his victims fell to mistimed slogs into the leg-side deep. But he bowled Fergus Fergusson and then completed his five-for (and a hat-trick) with his 13th ball, which Elijah Eales thick-edged to Alex Lee-Young. That was his morning’s work: in the afternoon, he needed only two overs to take three for 5 against Manly (including Jay Lenton, first ball). Not the worst day’s work.