FROGS HOPPING MAD OVER WET WICKET
“The ball was hitting the pitch and mud was flying past your ear,” Talarico said yesterday. “You can understand if we had had rain all week, but there was no weather, so that is the most disappointing thing.
“I turned up on a 35C day thinking ‘There will be some big runs scored today’ and then someone said to me ‘The wicket’s wet’. I just laughed and then went out in the middle and pushed my finger into it. I was just in shock.
“It wasn’t just damp, it was a pudding.
“There was an old wicket on the side of the table that was bone dry, so they would have been better off rolling the old wicket for half an hour and playing on that.”
Talarico told the umpires that he felt the wicket was not fit for play, but it was deemed safe, and the game started on time.
“Richie Oliver is their (Geelong City) captain and also their curator and I asked him how come the wicket was wet and he said the sun hadn’t been out to dry the wicket. He assured me the wicket would play fine, but not surprisingly he won the toss and bowled.
“He (Oliver) is a champion player but I’m not sure about his ability to make a cricket wicket.”
Oliver admitted yesterday the wicket was soft at the start of play, with the predicted high temperatures not arriving until midafternoon.
“The weather wasn’t as good as forecast,” Oliver said.
“It was soft and it made it hard to play against the new ball, so that, combined with good bowling and bad batting, was always a recipe for a lot of wickets.
“There were a lot of low scores across Geelong so I think a few clubs were caught out by it. But if Murghe have a problem with Geelong City then they should come to us or the GCA rather than go through a public forum.
“I want the wickets to be the best they can be and we are leading the runs in the comp this year so I think we get it right more often than not.”
Murgheboluc had no answer to the skill of Kent Agg and Mark Worthington, capitulating early to be 4-8, before Tanil Dehigaspitiya showed some fight with 29 to lift the total to 57.
Former Geelong batsman Tom Elliott then proved the difference in the run chase, making 40 of his team’s 67, as it reached the total eight wickets down. Matt Tarbett exploited the conditions with career best figures of 7-28.
Talarico made 37 in the sec- ond dig to help his team to 6-84, leaving his team only an outside chance of securing a reverse outright next Saturday.
Agg took a further four wickets to add to the five he took in the first innings.
“I’ve played cricket for 20odd years and never played in a reverse outright, so obviously it’s going to be tough,” Talarico admitted. “I was just so disappointed that this should be happening at this time of year.
“A couple of their (Geelong City) senior players were embarrassed by the state of the wicket.
“That is just not cricket, 26 wickets for 190-odd runs in a day when it is 35C and there has been no weather around all week. Sometimes the scoreboard doesn’t reflect the state of a wicket, but it did on Saturday.”