After leading the Competition for most of the season we finished minor premier and played 2nd placed Hornsby at Turramurra Oval on the 16th and 17th March.

Day 1
Fortunately the week leading up to the Final was dry and the wicket was reasonable. The problem was that it had had little work done on it since the rain affected Semi Final the weekend before including cutting the grass. The wicket was correctly called a rogue – no one was ever ‘in’ until an unplayable ball was bowled.

John won the toss and put Hornsby in on a green and unprepared deck. 150 was always going to be a good score with the risk of further deterioration over the 2 days. After taking a little while to get our line and length right we bowled and fielded brilliantly but still had a challenging run chase. Geoff Richards with 3/18, John Steel 3/14, Andrew Watt 2/29 and Ben McNamara 2/49 were outstanding. Geoff and Ben did the bulk of the bowling – both bowling long spells.

Our turn to bat against a strong attack. At 6/45 we were struggling. Enter Michael McDowell (33) and Geoff Richards (45*) and we got an invaluable lead. They played the wicket the best of anyone – survive the wicket taking ball and hit the loose one hard. We finished our innings with a lead of 19 – invaluable runs.

Hornsby then had the opportunity to bat a 2nd time – this time to face 10 overs before stumps. At stumps we had them 2/31 – effectively 2/13and a full day ahead of us.

Day 2
Although well placed, we had issues. Geoff Richards could only bowl off half a run, Andrew Watt had rolled his ankle and John Steel was carrying a hamstring strain. This had an impact on allowing Hornsby getting to 146 – we needed to restrict them to under 120 batting last.

Geoff Richards (3/40) and Ben McNamara (5/72) were superb – bowling an almost unbroken spell to restrict them to a gettable 129 target. Geoff was unbelievable with 10 overs of bowling despite a strained thigh muscle and bowling on a shortened run. If he had been fully fit he would have been even more damaging. Added to this John Steel who bowled with a hamstring strain and it was an amazing effort to restrict them.

Batting a second time we lost early wickets again to be 3/10 but enter Michael McDowell 30 and Tony Hadley 28 and at 3/60 we were well in it until the wicket played up and some loose shots were played (necessary due to the need to hit loose balls) to see regular wickets fall to see us out for 90 – 29 runs shy of a Premiership.

Wrap-up
We have a lot to be proud of this season. We were the outstanding team throughout the season and lost to a side that used the poor conditions better (just enough) over the 2 days.

We had many stars over the season in batting and bowling.

Michael McDowell scored 450 at just on 40, Tony Hadley just on 300 at 45 Ross A 300 runs at 31, Nathan 270 at 30 with Andrew Fiedler, John Steel and Geoff Richards playing important innings throughout the season.

In the bowling, Ben was the Club’s top wicket taker with 35 and was simply superb all season. Geoff Richards came to us during Round 5 and still took over 20 wickets at around 10. Add to this tremendous efforts from John Steel, Andrew Watt and Kishore before he went overseas and we had the best attack over the full season of any other team – with our full strength team on the field no one was going to score more than 150 against us.

All up, while missing out in the Final we had a fabulous season and hopefully we will see most of the lads backup next season.

Congratulations to John Mitchell, our Captain, who was a major reason for our success – well done mate and to everyone who helped make this a very good season.

Ross A

Posted by Ross Anderson on March 21, 2008 06:25 AM