ORANGE City has begun its 2014-15 Royal Hotel Cup campaign in stunning fashion, knocking over this summer’s big guns CYMS at Wade Park on Friday night.
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Set an impressive 8-143 to chase after green and golds’ all-rounder Sam Dwyer bludgeoned his way to 51, the Warriors lost 4-2 at the death but eventually paced their chase to perfection to nail the target eight wickets down with just three balls to spare.
City skipper Matt Findlay described the clash as “an incredible game of T20 cricket”, but was filthy on his team’s lack of polish with the game effectively in the bag at 4-137, needing just seven runs to win.
“It’s a great win, and a great chase, but we should have passed their total with three or four overs left,” Findlay said.
“We lost 4-2 at one stage, that’s not good enough.
“CYMS surprised me with the amount of fight they showed in that situation at the end, and credit to them, but we were cruising ... we should have done it easy.”
Winning the toss and batting, CYMS suffered their own case of the yips in limping to 3-34 then 4-43 on a rock hard, batsman-friendly Wade Park deck.
But Dwyer was the anchor.
And an explosive one at that.
In his first match back from a brief absence from the game, the big-hitting CYMS all-rounder blazened his way to an cracking half-century before eventually falling to Shaun Kirby with the score on 104.
Late-innings fireworks from Englishman Curtis Free (19) helped the green and golds to a very defendable total.
But, in the end, City did it quite easily.
Openers Dave Boundy (21) and Adam Cowden (23) got the Warriors off to a flyer before a fifth-wicket, 62-run stand between Jackson Coote (49) and Ben Findlay (13) hammered the 2012-13 Orange District Cricket Association Twenty20 champions to an inevitable win.
“You couldn’t ask for a much better game of cricket,” CYMS captain Hamish Finlayson said.
“It’s always a good game against City, I’ve rarely played Orange City in a game that hasn’t been a nail-biter.”
Finlayson said, in a game that ebbed and flowed, Coote’s innings was pivotal.
“He just took the game away from us,” he said.
“Credit to our bowlers especially, I haven’t seen a better effort this year from Curtis and the other guys at the end of game. We never gave up.
“It’s a good effort first up, we can use that as a platform I think.
“We were flat in the first five or six overs in the field and that’s where the damage was done so we need to build from here.”
Tweaker Al Dhatt picked up 3-15 off four overs for CYMS, while for City Mark Toynton’s 4-27 was the pick of the match figures.
“We still didn’t execute everything as well as I would have liked,” Findlay lamented, furious at losing four wickets in quick time at the end of the match.
“We need to be more disciplined than that with the bat. And you can never be good enough in the field, but that’s a great building block.
“It’s a great start, but we can get much, much better in this form of the game.”
