Encouraging signs despite friendly result
IT is almost always better to lose a good pre-season game than win a bad one. That, at any rate, is the substantial consolation Southport and Birkdale’s cricketers can take from Saturday’s 45-run defeat to Bradshaw.
For while it is futile to wrap up any defeat so lavishly that it appears a victory, Chris Cunningham was still encouraged by much that he saw in his first proper match in charge.
S&B’s new skipper is learning about his players, particularly those he signed over the winter, so the fine bowling spells produced by Bobby Wincer and Basil Sultan were particularly heartening as the selectors ponder the composition of their team for the Liverpool Competition opener against Wallasey a week on Saturday.
Wincer took three for 33 in eight overs and Sultan two for 15 in six as Bradshaw were dismissed for 181 with eight balls of their 40-over allotment left unused. That total included a fine 69 off 96 balls from the former S&B wicketkeeper-batsman, Brad Yates, who fed greedily on the loose deliveries sent down by the S&B attack.
Cunningham knows that such indiscipline will also be punished by Liverpool Competition batsmen but one of the functions of pre-season games is to identify and smooth out such problems. Equally, S&B’s batsmen will need to learn to rotate the strike rather more efficiently than they managed on Saturday against a tight Bradshaw attack.
But the officials and groundstaff permitted to watch the game at Trafalgar Road could still take comfort from the 40s made by Jack Stanley and David Snellgrove, and even more so, perhaps, by the pair’s 50-run partnership for the third wicket.
When that stand ended, though, S&B lost their next five wickets for 45 runs against a Bradshaw side for whom Jordan Mason took three for 22 and Jordan Evans three for 17. Those spells, added to that of Zaid Patel, who conceded just 12 runs in eight overs, clearly established the visitors’ superiority.
All of which will be more or less forgotten if S&B enjoy a good start to their league campaign following Saturday’s final pre-season game at home to Norden.
Achieving that objective will be aided enormously if the fine standard of fielding evident in the Bradshaw game can be maintained and if the players continue to get to know each other’s cricket following a necessarily truncated winter training programme.
It cannot be stated too frequently that teams, not individuals, win cricket matches. Cunningham clearly has some talented players at his disposal and there may yet be one more addition to the squad come April 24th. But he knows that those fine cricketers must have become a team by the time they take the field at Wallasey in ten days’ time.
BRADSHAW 181 (38.4): (Yates 69, Liversedge 27, Zafi Patel 22; Wincer 3-33, Sultan 2-15, Firth 2-28)
S&B 136-8 (40): (Snellgrove 46, Stanley 41, JJ Fielding 12; Evans 3-17, Mason 3-22)