Lisa Sthalekar – Australian Hall of Fame Inductee

West Penno is one of the longest standing Clubs to offer Women’s Cricket to girls in Australia. Girls have played for us since the mid-1980’s and in 1996/97 we have run dedicated Girls Teams continuously – 940 registered players! No other Club comes even close to this record.

Lisa Sthalekar is the latest high achieving Woman from our ranks. I remember getting a call from Lisa’s dad back in 1988 when he wanted to know if Girls can play cricket. We arranged for Lisa to play with the Boys U10s and the rest is history.

Lisa played with the Boys Team right through to the U16s before going to Gordon Grade to follow another West Penno Woman high achiever – Denise Annetts.

During the week, Lisa was Inducted into the Australian Hall of Fame – a fantastic achievement:  here

This adds to her long list of other major achievements and awards:4 x World Cup winners; Women’s International Cricketer of the Year (2007), Allan Border Medal; 2 x Belinda Clarke Medal, NSW Hall of Fame; MCC Life Membership and now, the 4^th female to be inducted into the Australian Hall of Fame.

As a player, she is the first women to score 1,000 runs & take 100 wickets in ODI’s. See her playing record here: here

Well done Lisa!

Reelin in the years

First up, our theme music for this section – here

This season we have 2 of our former A1 Graders start the 2^nd generation of West Penno players to play for us. In Junior Blasters, we have the children of Kevin Wong (1995/96 to 2004/05) and Craig Ackerman (1988/89 to 2002/03) playing.

We also have the son of Dominic Thornely playing Junior Blasters. Dom Captained NSW and Australia A and was our Club Patron for many years.

Kevin played A1 between 2000/01 and 2003/04 taking 60 wickets @ 25.6 as an opening bowler. The photo is of the A1 Premiership side of 2002/03 and Kevin is 3rd left in the front row.

Craig played A1 in 1998/99 and took 14 wickets @ 21.8.

To complete the picture, the other players in this photo of our A1 Premiers in 2002/03 are:

Matt Barr, Chris Thomas (C); Glen Percival Simon Davies; Chris Boyd; Matt Stephens; Adam Gerard Front (L-R): Greg Stoneham; Craig Stubbs; Kevin Wong; Ben Gerard, Peter Whitehead

Good News stories

A couple of stories that show what makes our Club Special and different to everyone else.

Lost & found

Story 1.

A great story about Sreeni Pillamarri (C3). In 2018 Sreeni has organised a 380 kilometre walk from Parramatta to Canberra to raise money for our Farmers experiencing drought.

In January 2020 he raised funds for the RFS to support to Bushfire fighting effort. Earlier this year he raised money for the homeless during the CEO sleep-out. Fast-forward to last week.

Sreeni was at Greenway Park and noticed a wallet on the ground. Unfortunately the contact number was incorrect so Sreeni personally drove from his house at Cherrybrook to the address on the wallet at Baulkham Hills. Fortunately someone was home – it just happened to be Todd Hutchinson’s wallet. Todd plays in the B1 Red side.

A helping hand

Story 2.

Also during the week, we got a call from a Life Member of the Pennant Hills Football Club to help out the family of one of their Club Members. One of their Club Members died recently and they wanted to have a memorial service at Campbell Park on Thursday 25 February from 4.30 pm – a prime training time.

The call went out to the Teams that use the ground for training – our U8 & U9s – to see if they can move training to another day to help out. The response came back within hours that they would be happy to move. It would have been easy to say it is all too hard with a shortage of training facilities but there was no hesitation – well done Simon & Rosh.

Volunteer numbers

During the week I was chatting to a couple of other Clubs, both cricket and other Codes, and they lamented the lack of Volunteers that makes running Clubs like ours increasingly harder. This explains why many Clubs don’t survive.

We are a bit different. Our Club culture is one where many people volunteer their time to help out. Just think about this for a moment. Many Clubs have a handful of active volunteers. At last count we had 241 active Volunteers. This covers Team Coaches, Managers, Scorers, Umpires, Gear stewards, Age and Division Co-ordinators, Child Protection, Senior Captains and Executive Committee. Add to this our Representation at the Association including the President & Junior leaders and this is a remarkable achievement.

This number doesn’t include those folk who run the Presentation BBQ’s, Pink Stumps day and other initiatives. So the real contribution is much bigger.

What is amazing is that most of our Volunteers start at Junior Blasters and stay involved for many years.

What would your decision be?

Last week we posed this question from the CNSW Umpires & Scorers:

“You are the bowler’s end umpire. A No ball contacts the body of the striker, who is making no attempt to play it with the bat. The ball goes on to put the striker’s wicket down before being missed by the wicket-keeper who watches it roll over the boundary. There is an appeal. What happens next?”

The answer:

The umpire shall answer the appeal not out then call and signal Dead ball the moment the ball crosses the boundary. The boundary allowance is disallowed, and the batsmen are returned to their original ends if they had started to run.

 The umpire shall signal No ball to the scorers, waiting for an acknowledgement. You cannot be out bowled from a No ball, hence the not out decision and the ball remaining in play. The umpire will disallow Leg byes due to the striker making no genuine attempt to play the ball with the bat nor trying to avoid being hit by the ball.

 No runs will be scored from that delivery except the one run penalty for the No ball and any relevant five-run penalty that may occur, except those resulting from Law 28.3. Law 23.3.