Wheels fall off as S&B suffer batting collapse
Liverpool Gin Liverpool Competition: ECB Premier League: Rainhill (21pts) 122 beat Southport and Birkdale (5pts) 41 by 81 runs
TEAMS bowled out for 41 are well advised not to seek refuge in excuses or gloss over their deficiencies.
Southport and Birkdale’s first team required a rather modest 123 runs to begin their ECB Premier League season with an encouraging victory over Rainhill on Saturday.
They had got precisely a third of the way towards that target when their last wicket fell in a game which occupied a mere 64.4 overs.
The final batsman to be dismissed was Tearan Gleeson, who was caught at slip by Ryan Wiliams off the Maharashtra slow left-arm bowler, Akshay Darekar, after making a polished 20 on a day when his outstanding catch to remove the Rainhill opener, Ben Edmundson, had offered further evidence of the Australian’s talent.
S&B’s entire innings lasted 21 overs. Only four batsmen faced more than ten deliveries. Gleeson and Bradley Yates were the only batsmen to reach double figures.
Everyone who has played the game knows that there are innings when everything goes wrong. However, the wheels rarely fall off quite as rapidly as they did for Firth’s team on Saturday.
The defeat left the captain deeply disappointed but keen to put the result in perspective.
‘We bowled and fielded really well on Saturday but we just kept missing straight balls,” he said “No one got out trying to whack one but we got ourselves in a hole and couldn’t get out of it.
“There were other very low scores on Saturday and we do know the Premier League is not going to be easy. We blew an opportunity but we know we’re also capable of beating the really good sides.
“It’s not like last year when there was a time when I thought we could get bowled out for 80 every week.”
Firth’s view is underpinned by his belief that he has assembled a decent team this year and that he has a batting unit capable of posting or chasing totals.
Nevertheless, games like Saturday’s encounter against Ormskirk at Brook Lane are always going to be exceptionally testing and S&B’s fixture-list in May could have been devised by the Marquis de Sade.
So it was certainly encouraging that S&B’s bowlers found some of their better form on Saturday, no one more so than Andy Warhurst, who dismissed three of the top five batsmen in Rainhill’s order.
Warhurst was well supported by the spinners, Firth and Chris Cunningham, the latter performing well on his competitive debut for his new club.
The fielding, which is always a good indication of a team’s well-being, was keen and competent, Nick Knight taking three catches.
There were, then, crumbs of encouragement to be taken from the defeat, albeit that almost none of them were to be found in S&B’s batting.
Rainhill’s opening bowlers, Ryan Williams and the India A spinner, Darekar, enjoyed themselves hugely, but the standard of their bowling was probably not as high as S&B will find at Ormskirk or against many other Premier League teams.
Last September S&B earned the right to play at this level. Over the next five months we will find out whether they are up to it or not.
To be bowled out once for 41 may be just about understandable; for it to happen two or three times will begin to look like a nightmare on Duke Street.