A LOWER order recovery and a disciplined bowling and fielding performance gave the Bathurst side a third straight win in the Mitchell Cricket Council under 14s competition on Sunday.

Playing on home turf at Morse Park 1, the hosts were in all sorts of trouble after losing four quick wickets, but were bailed out by some determined efforts lower on the card.

Combined with some wayward Orange bowling that gave away plenty of sundries, Bathurst scraped together enough to win by 21 runs.

“We were 4-30 or so early on, to get up to 152 was a really good effort,” Bathurst co-coach Shane Broes said.

“Ben Cant and Ethan Cusick got stuck in and put together a bit of a stand to get us going again, and then Ben Mitchell and Ryan Cooke had a good partnership and that was enough to get us a good gritty sort of total.

“With the ball we took a couple of crucial wickets, we got their two best batsmen in Max Powell and Lachlan Coyte without scoring, and in general the fielding standard was very good.”

Batting first, as Broes alluded to the Bathurst side were in a world of trouble when they lost their first four wickets with only 24 on the board as Luka Wynn went berserk with the new ball.

Cant (26) and Cusick (25) knew they were facing a big challenge, but they were up for it. They put their team back in the contest with a 57-run stand.

When they both fell in quick succession the wheels could have come off once more for Bathurst, but Mitchell (23) and Cooke (24) almost replicated the earlier effort of Cant and Cusick, putting on 42 for the seventh wicket.

Their side was dismissed in the 48th over for 152, helped by a massive 38 extras.

Ben Winslade (2-35) was the other multiple wicket-taker for Orange.

Their reply got off to a similarly poor start to Bathurst’s innings and they were 3-14 as Mitchell backed up his batting exploits with a couple of early wickets.

Ryan Manning stood tall in the face of the onslaught and held Orange’s innings together with a well-paced 51, but wickets were falling rapidly at the other end.

Shortly after he departed, having scored two-thirds of his team’s runs, Orange were 7-79.

They tried to hang in the contest thanks to Joe Kay (23) and Harry Pearce (14), who gave their side a sniff at 7-113 and 8-130, but Nick Broes snuffed things out with a quick burst that reaped 4-5 from 29 deliveries. Orange were all out for 131.

“Today was a big stepping stone for us, we had fairly comfortable wins in the first two rounds but we knew that this was a stronger side and one we had to step up against and another upside to this win is that we can still improve,” Shane Broes said.