ST Pat’s Old Boys have injected some spark into their Bathurst District Cricket Association first grade season with a win over Centennials Bulls on Saturday.
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In the meeting between the only two remaining winless teams in the competition it was last season’s grand finalists who scored the valuable points with a 40-run win at The Scots School.
Useful contributions were easy to come across throughout the Pat’s card. Nic Broes (53), Brendon Cutmore (38) and Adam Ryan (35) played the biggest roles in helping the Saints reach 6-228 from their 40 overs.
In his opening appearance of the BDCA season Josh Toole finished with figures of 3-51. Ryan Gurney was next best with 2-19.
Gurney (85) was the standout performer for the Bulls in their chase but the dismissal of the middle order man with 10 overs remaining took the fire out of the team’s innings.
With the score at 6-141 following Gurney’s wicket there was still an outside chance for Cents to hunt down the target.
Pat’s ensured that wouldn’t happen as their bowling attack offered little for Bulls to go after. Centennials finished all out for 188.
“We’ve been playing good cricket. The challenge is that the comp is much tighter this year. Credit to everyone. Every game we’ve played in so far has been a really good game of cricket,” Cutmore said.
“All of them could have gone either way. It’s been good partnerships or a strong bowling spell that’s been the difference.
“We had plenty of good starts and the difference in this game was that we kept good momentum through the course of our innings. In a couple of our other games we’ve fallen away a little bit, not with wickets, but we’d allow ourselves to get bogged down.
“This time we kept the momentum ticking over.”
Matt Fearnley led the way with the ball, taking 3-30. Broes backed up his performance with the bat to take 2-9 off eight overs.
“Matt Fearnley’s bowling is definitely worth a mention,” Cutmore said.
“We play much better cricket when we’ve got Fearns leading from the front with the ball like that.”
Fearnley has now taken seven wickets from his past two games, following on from a 4-33 for Bathurst against Blue Mountains.