Mt Everest journey – the sequel

First up – our theme music for Nirav’s achievement Shawn Mendis’ song – Top of the world

Two weeks ago we ran a great story on Nirav Desai (D1 Blue) and dual Premiership winning Captain (D2) on his way to the Mt Everest Base camp.

Base Camp is no ‘walk in the park’. It is 5,364 metres above sea level – Mt Kosciuszko, our highest peak is 2,228 metres above sea level. The trek is 130 kilometres long and takes around 12 days to help with acclimatization! Also, between 5 and 15 people die on the trek each year due to acute mountain sickness. So this is no easy trek.

Just last week, Nirav made it to Base Camp. Nirav also had his photo taken with the famous West Penno Baggy Blue. Our players have had their photos taken all over the world proudly wearing their West Penno colours but none, so far at this altitude.

Well done Nirav!!

Photo: Nirav at Mt Everest Base camp with West Penno Premiership cap – November 2023

Christmas tree competition

As you walk in the front door of the Sports Club you can’t miss the 4 x Christmas trees. The 4 main Sporting clubs each have a decorated tree – West Penno cricket, Demons (AFL), Lions Football & Giants (Baseball).

The Sports Club is running a competition between 1^st December & 31^st December 2023 with the most popular tree, as voted on by the Club members gets a $1,000 donation.

This took our wonderful volunteers 4 hours to decorate (they finished at 11.00 pm on Tuesday night); one of our volunteers (Ruth), hand marked the stitches on the 200 Red baubles; our Girls cricket players prepared the candy cane cricket bats and lots more.

The voting process works this way.

Every time someone makes $5 or more purchase at the Bar or Restaurant they get a voucher for each $5 spent and patrons are invited to choose the best decorated tree. The winning entry gets the $1,000 donation – simple as that.

We might be biased but our tree is a beauty. There are 200 red baubles with hand-painted seams to look like a cricket ball, hand-made decorated cricket bats by our Girls players, a Warnie angel on top of the tree and much more.

So if you needed any incentive to come on down to the Club, get something at the bar or restaurant and then use the token this is a pretty good one.

Photo: our decorated tree at the Sports Club.

ICC World ODI Championship – our connection

It was interesting to see Mitchell Marsh get death threats for using the ICC World Cup trophy as a foot rest.

Wind the clock back to 2007 when Australia won the ICC ODI World Cup when they beat Sri Lanka by 53 runs in a rain affected match in England.

In those days, the Trophy was held, while in transit, by News Limited and basically sat on someone’s desk until CA asked for it back.

In 2007, that desk was used by James Mielnik (C3 to B1 – 2002/03 to 2017/18) who worked at News. You can only imagine the ‘Twitterverse’, sorry ‘Xverse’ going into meltdown if this happened today.

As background, in 2007, James was a very handy B1 Grade player. When he sent the photo through he made the following comment:

“I would swap this for a B Grade Premiership any day”.

Photo: James with the ICC ODI World Cup in July 2007.

“Was it as good for you as it was for me?”

In the D1 Red game, Farjad, forgot to bring his kit bag – nothing. After managing to get all the gear from different players there was one protective item that was difficult to source – a protector. To the rescue came Tim who had a remnant from his junior cricket days – in fact a very small remnant. Lots of questions about whether it was still too big but he was set to go.

Anyway, waiting to go into bat at No 11 he was all padded up and ready to go.

Enter your friendly Club Secretary (WWC accreditation number REG0064980) who wanted to check to see how small the protector actually was – a quick tap here and a quick tap there. Unfortunately, Farjad wasn’t wearing the protector when your friendly Club Secretary tapped the protected area to see how small it was.

After a short time to recover he went out to bat, with the protector on and fortunately it wasn’t needed in the game or after the innings.