It’s semifinal time for premier one-day cricket

NPOB will have a full strength squad with a wealth of talent and experience to choose from.

Eight teams have been cut to four with New Plymouth Old Boys (NPOB), Inglewood, New Plymouth Marist United (NPMU) and New Plymouth Boys’ High School (NPBHS) successfully reaching the semifinals of the premier grade cricket one-day competition.

The semifinals are scheduled for tomorrow with NPOB as top qualifiers taking on fourth placed NPBHS at Western Park. The round two clash between the two sides was abandoned.

NPOB will have a full strength squad with a wealth of talent and experience to choose from, whereas the NPBHS side will be severely depleted, with the NPBHS First XI away competing at the Gillette Cup finals.

NPBHS were still willing to front up and play the semifinals as scheduled, which is a credit to them.

NPBHS will rely on their fringe First XI players and a number of second XI players to make the step up and compete with one of the stronger teams in premier cricket.

Inglewood, who finished second on the table, will play their first match of the season on the Karo Park grass wicket against NPMU.

Inglewood got the better of NPMU in the round-robin with a narrow two-wicket win and should take some confidence from that.

Inglewood will be wary of NPMU’s opener Dean Robinson as he is coming off a big century for Taranaki last week and no doubt the NPMU side will look to build their innings around Robinson with some hard hitting middle order batsmen to follow. Inglewood is one side in the competition with no current representative players so have had a stable team week to week throughout the competition so far.

With a number of former representative players in the squad Inglewood will be tough to beat on their home ground.

Teams NPOB:

Matt Shaw, Myles Simkin, Mattie Thomas, Davis Mills, Quinn Mills, Jarrod Ritson, Viranchi Upadhyay, Ben Mitchell, Oliver Burbidge, Ben Frewin, Jordan Gard, Ryan Gilmour.

NPBHS: Sam Rankin, Chester Oldfield, David Graham, Hrishi Bolar, Hugo Roy, Riley Bettington, Joshua Gard, Nick Bettington, Hakeem Faider, Jack Brooker, Nathan Morice, Qingcheng Du

Inglewood: Aaron Taylor, Aaron Zame, Brent How, Brent Stevens, Clint Frost, Hayden McIntyre, Jason Dombroski, Luke Dravitzki, Matt Simpson, Richard Clough, Sam Broadmore, Troy Chilcott, Tyla Judson

NPMU: Ryan Fleming, Dean Robinson, Sam Fastier, Ryan Watson, Robbie Yule, Jarred Cunningham, Leith Johnston, Jacob Richards, Sean Mosquera, Joshua Barrett, Michael Blanks, Daniel Bernet, Shay Smith