Too close to call in Sunfoil Series
LEADERS: TITANS OVERTAKEN BY DOLPHINS AT THE TOP
Morris tells how Boucher let fly after game against Lions.
The Sunfoil Series continues to be a tightly-contested competition after the seventh round of matches all ended in draws at the weekend, with the Dolphins snatching a 1.12-point lead over the Titans.
But just 19.74 points separate the KwaZulu-Natalians and bottom team Cape Cobras, so all six franchises still have everything to play for.
Defending champions Titans lost ground as the Highveld Lions had the better of their derby match in Benoni, but all-rounder Chris Morris said they would be stronger for the lessons taken out of that match.
“We didn’t play our best cricket this weekend but fortunately all the results went our way and even the Lions weren’t that positive in going for the win. We know exactly what we did wrong – you can’t allow a whole lot of batsmen to get to 30 and then get out, and 70% of the guys got themselves out, and we bowled a lot better in the second innings because we were lacking energy in the first innings and Mark Boucher gave us a rollicking,” Morris said yesterday.
The all-rounder took 2/68 and top-scored for the Titans with 39 in the first innings, before causing the Lions to collapse to 97/5 in their second innings with 3/23 in 14 overs. Unfortunately he left the field after bowling the first ball of his 15th over, but said it was just a precautionary move as he had some cramping in his quad.
The other two matches featured even less cricket due to rain.
The Knights and the Dolphins drew in Kimberley, where Vaughn van Jaarsveld blazed a double century and there were big hundreds from Theunis de Bruyn and Senuran Muthusamy as well. Rudi Second also scored a century for the Knights and then took four wickets with his off-spin, becoming only the third wicketkeeper in the last 40 years of South African domestic cricket to take four wickets in an innings, behind Daryn Smit of the Dolphins, on five occasions, and John Stephenson of Eastern Province, against Natal, in 1975/76.
There was also a stalemate between the Warriors and the Cobras in East London, where Colin Ackermann maintained his position as the leading run-scorer in this year’s competition with 89 and Yaseen Vallie scored 94 against his former team from the Western Cape. Andrew Puttick top-scored for the Cobras with 85 and Aviwe Mgijima made his second successive half-century.