Timeless Grand Finals

The Seniors Grand Finals are now played over 2 days on successive days – Saturday and Sundays.

It wasn’t always the case.

Back in 1951/52 the A1 Grade Final (Bannockburn Oval and Hassell Park) started on 19^th April and ended on 21^st June (10 Saturdays). In these days, Finals were ‘timeless’ and were played over 4 innings with no time restriction. The game was started at Bannockburn Oval but by week 10 of the Final the wicket was covered for the football season. The game was then moved to Hassell Park – St Ives home ground. After being well placed we lost.

Those who played attribute this to the change in venue to St. Ives home ground. After this we lost a number of our A Grade players, including Laurie Tuckerman who scored a record 1,361 runs in the season.

All West Penno Final

On Sunday 11 March 2018, our U12 Purple Team played our Red Team in the U12 Final at Thornleigh Oval. While not the first time we have had 2 WPHC play each other in a Junior Final this match was also Umpired by Barry McDonald (Chairperson) and Rob Hanich (Juniors Director) making this an all WPHC Final. For the record, the game was won by the Red Team.

Previous instances of WPHC Teams playing against each other in Junior Grand Finals are:

• U11s:
  • 2000/01 – Blue Vs White
  • 2007/08 – Gold Vs Green
  • 2013/14 – Blue Vs Gold
• U12s:
  • 2002/03 – Blue Vs Gold
  • 2008/09 – Green Vs Gold
• U13s:
  • 2008/09 – Red and Blue
• U14s:
  • 2009/10 – Blue Vs Red
• • U15s:
    • 2005/06 – White Vs Blue
    • 2011/15 – Red Vs White.

The Gift who keeps on giving

Who else but Eric Junkkari (B2) – “The Gift who keeps on giving”. Eric’s latest effort was during the Grand Final. The boys were all sitting around getting ready to head out when they heard a shout from the corner:

“Who’s on next for their warm up?!’

When the boys turned around there was “Gift” on the bike, cycling furiously and with a look of sheer delight. So it has now taken a distinguished playing career of 26 years for us to finally to come up with a worthy nick name – “Gift” in recognition of his dossier of anecdotes.

One tough Team

The D2 boys are full of ‘supermen’. They played their Grand Final this weekend with 3 injured players and someone suffering sleep deprivation. Normally, all 4 players would not be playing. But…this is a Grand Final and there were no players available to have played the minimum of 4 games in that Grade, or lower, to qualify. So…they all played. How about this for guts:

• Brent van Wck (pictured left) had blood poisoning in his leg and came in at 4, scoring 58 with mostly boundaries as he couldn’t run
• John Rose (pictured centre) had surgery on a broken finger on Monday and batted at 8 (he normally bats 4)
• Waman Tamhankar (pictured right)  has a broken thumb from last weekend and had his hand bandaged up like an Egyptian Mummy. He batted with 1 hand at 10 and scored 2 and put on 11 runs
• Ian Williams wife has had a new baby girl and he has had 4 hours sleep in 2 days.

They still scored 162 runs and rolled Hornsby for 81 with john Rose bowling 16 overs and taking 4/10– a sensational Team effort.

Above and beyond
We have so many examples of our players putting-in to help out other Teams. In the D2 Grand Final, 2 of our players broke bones in their hands the previous week in the Semi Final. Typical of the spirit of this Team they played but couldn’t field.

Enter Tim Worthington (B2 Blue Skipper and pictured left) and Steve Quanborough (D1 and Seniors Director) who fielded for the boys despite wanting to see the B2 Blue side in their Final. Well done boys.

A great photo

This had to be included if only because it is a great photo – a Kookaburra watching the B2 Grand Final @ Kenthurst Park on the weekend. I understand that it is about to appear on the global Kookaburra website.

Rocket Scientists

This is a deceptive photo. What it doesn’t show is the huge amount of time it took Nirav Desai and Mike Kinchington (D2) to assemble the shelter and put it in the covering. It brought back memories of Eric ‘Gift’ Junkkari trying to assemble a shelter that was eventually left in pieces at Gilroy College.

Kanga to U16s record

The Arthur Souter Shield is presented to those graduating U16s who have played continuously since Kanga cricket days. It is recognition of the fantastic contribution each player and parent has made over a lifetime of playing cricket for our Club.

At the Junior Presentation on Saturday (17 March) we had a record 23 players graduate. This beat the previous record of 18 players in 2013/14.

Many of these boys will play Seniors next season and the ‘cycle of life’ starts over again with the next generation of ‘home grown’ stars sustaining our great Club. How appropriate was it also that James Makin (A1 Captain) presented the Awards.

TeamApp latest

On Day 1 of the Grand Final, with our 2 teams (B2 and D2) playing we had 7,277 screen views. Day 2 was played on Sunday and we got 14,811 views – an amazing 22,088 screen views in just 2 days. We are the 6^th most used TeamApp in Australia and we expect this to grow this even more next season.

No rest

Tim Worthington is the head Ground keeper at Pymble Golf Course. Even when working Tim has cricket firmly on his mind as shown in this photo of Tim’s work office.