Today (Tuesday 14th) we took two teams to the annual cricket competition to find the Gedling champions and borough representatives to go forward to the county finals.
Our Year 5 team comfortably won all their matches en route to the final where they faced a strong Arno Vale team. We limited Arno Vale to what looked like a very ‘gettable’ score of 138; not beyond us as we’d averaged around 170 in our preceding matches. We were well on track for that half-way way through our innings. Unfortunately, the opposition bowlers sort of pinned us down – with great bowling, to be fair – for the final 4 overs and we fell a bit short of the required total.
Our Year 6 team had to do without star player Ollie, who was away on county duty for Notts. Nonetheless, the team played some great cricket to reach the semi final, losing narrowly there to a strong Burton Joyce team. Would Ollie have made the difference? Probably! We went onto the 3rd/4th place playoff and won that comfortably, which was a nice way to finish the day..
All in all… a brilliant day. Some great cricket played, but our players shone in other ways too. More important way really. I (Mr H) lost count of the number of people who came up to compliment them on their manners and sportsmanship. Sadly, the same could not be said of all the teams there, but our children were impeccable. A special mention for the Year 6 lads who basically sorted themselves out for the day, getting themselves to the right pitches, sorting their line-ups out and making sure they communicated with the umpires and organisers. Our children are unusual, maybe unique, inasmuch as you might even consider doing this confident that it will go just fine. The feedback received about them was glowing – not a word out of place all day and so cheerful and positive. It’s all good experience for transition to secondary to have such a level of responsibility and they managed it perfectly, all of them!
Not winners on the day perhaps, but winning at life!
Update – we have now been told that our Y5 team will qualify for the County FInals day on grounds of being the best runner-up across the eleven borough-level tournaments; this is great news for the players, who get another day out playing, this time in West Bridgford on the 9th of July