Most of the schools in Nelson Mandela Bay have kicked the rugby ball away for now and cricket balls are flying all over the place.
Straight away, there were some excellent performances on the cricket field and we are in for an exciting season in the Bay.
Pearson High, of Gqeberha, performed brilliantly early in the month at the Cape Youth Cricket Festival in Cape Town.
Jayden Groenewald, Oliver Newland-Nell and Nikolai Hector all received man of the match awards during the tournament.
Pearson was the only team which went through the Festival unbeaten.
They continued on their winning ways this past Saturday in overcast conditions in Gqeberha, when they beat Motherwell RPC by 130 runs.
Groenewald was the star of the show. He performed with the bat and the ball when Pearson scored 214/7, and then bowled their opponents out for 84 runs.
A solid innings of 56 runs (59 balls) by Groenewald laid the foundation for the good score by Pearson.
Groenewald took 2/20 in a disciplined bowling effort of 10 overs. Esa Gangat also picked up two wickets.
Framesby (Gqeberha) and Brandwag (Kariega) did very well in the Punt Festival, earlier this month, in Mossel Bay.
Brandwag played their best cricket in the matches they won against Glenwood and Sentraal. Three huge victories were part of Framesby’s campaign. They beat Strand by 202 runs, Paarl Gym by 170 runs and Belville by 99. Corne Jordaan was on fire with the bat against Strand. He was unbeaten with 108 runs, scored off 116 deliveries, behind his name.
Zandre Delport did most of the damage with the ball for Framesby in this match. He took 3/11 in four overs.
Delport was again in on the action against Paarl Gym. He again took three wickets, this time 3/14 in six overs.
The Bellville batters also found Delport too hot to handle. He destroyed them with 4/30 in 8 overs. Jordaan (3/17) also did a fine job.
In this victory it was Hanro van Jaarsveld who scored the bulk of the runs for Framesby with a polished unbeaten knock of 89 runs.
Grey High was in action against very strong opposition this past weekend in the T20 North-South Tournament in Gauteng. They made it to the semi-final of the Plate Section where they were involved in a thriller with St Andrews College (Makhanda).
St Andrews batted first and made 174 runs. The Grey boys were restricted to 165/7 in their 20 overs to give victory to St Andrews by a mere nine runs.
It should be interesting to see how many Bay schools play two-day matches, also called declaration or time cricket, during the season.
In next week’s column we will ask the question if there is a place for this format at school level, given the ever-growing popularity of the shorter formats of the game.
- Coaches and players are invited to mail their views on this to steenkamphenk@gmail.com
