Twickenham U9s and Sheen Park U9s serve up entertaining encounter on the Green
Ts take the strain against Sheen Park, ultimately easing home by 29 runs.
On a weekend when rain was in rather too plentiful supply, the Twickenham and Sheen Park U9s did very well indeed to get a full 40 overs of cricket in. Sometimes, to paraphrase Napoleon, it really is better to be lucky than good (see here for the card).
Stop-start batting with a crescendo at the end
Captain Paarth Vaswani won the toss for the Ts and had no hesitation in deciding to bat. With normal go-to opener Nico Morgan away, the skipper himself and debutant James Penrose strode out to take first hit.
Stanley Bailey and Edward Jayaprakash nonetheless bowled very well for the visitors, and it took time for the runs to start flowing. Indeed, it was only after a brief hide-under-the-trees to shield from the rain, that the Ts’ batters really got into their stride.
Vince Hough (18 at a run-a-ball) was in the middle of that, although Jaden Mate (again) hit cleanly and ran smartly. Tom Bellingham (0-5 off 2) and Oscar Turcan (0-6 off 2) did their best to keep things in check, but Una Ryan and Noah Lemos still managed to put on 25 between overs 12-16 between them. That left final pair Stan Hough (14 off 10) and Harvir Ghere (14 off 14) to jet-propel Twickenham to a score north of 300 (302, to be precise).
Jaden Mate turns the screw
In reply Sheen Park made it clear that they were going to try and rotate the strike whenever they could. Indeed, our old friends kami and kaze were heavily involved in a number of the tight singles attempted.
Most of the time the Sheen Park batters did manage to get home safely, but they did still take on golden arm Una Ryan once too often; she threw down all three stumps to run one batter out by fully five yards. Excellent stuff.
Stanley Bailey (13 off 12) and Edward Jayaprakash (11 off 12) nonetheless batted well, as did Arlo Watson-Jones (13 off 17) and Oscar Turcan (11 off 16). But, wickets did keep falling around them; Stan Hough took 2-9 with his leg spin, whilst Jaden Mate was particularly stingy. His 12 balls went for just six runs and he, too, took two wickets.
Harvir Ghere, Vince Hough and Faris Iqbal were also successful with the ball, whilst James Penrose also bowled a decent spell.
That meant that Sheen Park ultimately fell 29 runs short. But, the very fact that the sides got a game in at all was the big deal really. Great stuff one and all.