Page 19 - West Pennant Hills Cherrybrook Cricket Club

Scott came to the crease with only a few overs remaining, and from ball 1 looked keen to get the target as quickly as possible. Sure, he didn’t connect with anything... but at least his lofty swings leading up to the close of play added some extra excitement to the final stages of the contest. We passed their total in the final over, and will start tomorrow on 131, with Tom on 56 with Scott on 4.
With 90 overs to go, it’s not over by any means, certainly not against the highest scoring team in the B2 comp. But it was a nice feeling to end the day with an innings victory, and we’ll take confidence from that into our final day of cricket for 20/21 tomorrow.
Day 2
With the game poised for an exciting finish, an unexpected start to the day awaited us. An errant sprinkler had run amok overnight under the heavy covers, turning one end of the pitch into quite the quagmire and delaying play while the teams did all they could to dry out the end. Thankfully, we only lost 45 minutes, and given the rapid over rate yesterday we were confident that we could still get a full day’s play in.
Starting just 1 run ahead with 3 wickets in hand, it was a simple equation. Bat for as long as possible to set as big a lead as we could. Tom & Scott were watchful early on, but quickly stepped up the run rate as they got more comfortable with the conditions. It certainly wasn’t easy going, particularly at the sticky end, where balls were regularly kicking up off a length and keeping us on our toes. Scott was eventually dismissed for a very valuable 26.
Cam Bliss then joined Tom at the crease, looking as solid as he had all year and supporting Tom well before being caught for 11. With 9 wickets down, Tom decided it was time to accelerate to get the team the biggest lead possible, taking more chances to try and find the rope. Finally, just on lunch, Tom’s innings drew to a close on 90 just before lunch, with the team on 198. With this most crucial of innings, he notched up the highest individual score of any of our batsmen this year, secured an invaluable 68 run lead for the team, and put us well and truly in the driver’s seat of this grand final.
With 2 sessions to go, the game very much hinged on the ability for Castle HIll to score runs at a rapid rate, and we knew that this would largely (if not entirely) depend on the performance of their skipper. We also knew that this pitch was a doozy, and with the extra speed and bounce of our bowlers we should be able to extract much more out of it than they could.
We opened with Scott and Jack today, and once again Jack took a wicket in the 2nd over. Same batsman, dismissed in the same way, caught by the same fieldsman, on the same score (0). At the other end, we focused on containing their skipper, setting fields to restrict his run scoring opportunities and covering the boundary for his strongest shots. This nearly paid off, with a few tough chances going to ground or falling just out of reach. One of these was a spectacular effort off Cameron, taking an incredible boundary catch in mid-air before having to throw the ball back into the field of play to avoid it going over the boundary.
While their skipper managed to clear the rope on a few occasions, the other end was completely choked up and the run rate clearly wasn’t accelerating as quickly as they would have liked. All our bowlers contained beautifully, and while the Castle Hill skipper’s class shone through on his way to an unbeaten hundred, they just hadn’t scored quickly enough to apply scoreboard pressure on us. They declared with a lead of 88 and less than an hour and a half to play.
Even with the pitch deteriorating we felt a very good chance of collecting the runs, but we had some wobbles early. Campbell, Basil & Tim all fell cheaply facing up at the rough end of the pitch, and at 3/10 with 20 overs remaining Castle Hill started to get some belief back. It took a strong and confident 35 from Ben Dunkerley, exceptionally supported by the patient and watchful Alec Silins (20), to get us back on track. Once they felt the energy levels drop from the opposition, they both started aggressively punishing bad deliveries. Ben and Alec both fell with only a handful of overs left, and Cameron and Tom comfortably steered us through to 6pm to secure the title thanks to our first innings victory.
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