Bathurst District Cricket Association Twenty20 first grade games set to start

Bathurst added Twenty20 matches to its calendar in 2017 to give players more access to a growing format in the region but not a single game went ahead.

Three straight patches of rain – timed perfectly to ruin every round – struck the city’s fields but with a sunny day of 28 degrees predicted there’s certain to be big hits ringing across Bathurst this time.

BDCA president Campbell Graham said bringing the shorter-form games back for another season was always on the cards.

“It’s giving our guys more exposure to T20 because Mitchell obviously have their competition, so we want to bring that into our own competition,” he said.

“Orange have their T20 competition on a Friday night and that’s very successful and we wanted to give our guys more exposure to the game at home.”

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Every Bathurst first grade club has enjoyed some connection to Orange’s Royal Hotel Cup.

Bathurst City, Centennials Bulls and St Pat’s Old Boys are members of the competition while Rugby Union’s Sam Macpherson and City Colts’ Wayne Sellers are signed up as marquee players for Redbacks and Cavaliers respectively.

Despite missing out on last season’s BDCA competition due to rain Bathurst players blew through the Mitchell T20 Cup with an undefeated record.

Gaining more time in the big hitting format could make the city’s representative side an ever bigger force at the next level.

“We have our Monday T20 competition which is a mixture of all grades but it’s good to give our biggest hitters in first grade their own competition,” Graham said.

“The only downfall we had was losing a first grade side. All the association could do was work with what they had so some teams will have just the one game over the weekend and a bye.

“In retrospect we could have done our draw a little differently but we wanted to keep that T20 competition going through at least this season.”