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Rod Lyall 11/06/19

For the second time in three days, HBS Craeyenhout found themselves going into the final over against ACC on Monday with the match in the balance.

This time, however, they held on for the victory, Wessel Coster conceding just five of the eight runs ACC required and trapping Saqib Zulfiqar leg-before with the final delivery to get his side home by two runs.

Saqib’s 61 had brought the Amsterdammers ever so close after disciplined bowling by the HBS attack had contained the top order and forced the batsmen into errors as they attempted to raise the tempo of the innings.

Excelsior had found themselves in the same situation at Craeyenhout on Saturday, but whereas Lorenzo Ingram had managed to create a platform from which the tail was able to scramble the win, Saqib’s effort, from 69 deliveries with four boundaries, fell just short.

He was well supported by Anis Raza (31) and Jamieson Mulready (25), but with Zak Gibson claiming three early wickets and Navjit Singh breaking both those vital partnerships, the HBS attack was able to withstand ACC’s final assault.

Zulfiqar’s side was, it is true, chasing the highest total of the season at Het Loopveld, HBS again demonstrating the solidity of its batting by posting 207 for nine, mainly thanks to Sharn Gomes’s 108-ball 81.

The remaining members of the top six all got a start without really going on with it, while for ACC the brothers Zulfiqar each claimed three wickets, Sikander at a cost of 55 runs and Saqib for 33.

On a day when rain was a constant threat the match in Amstelveen suffered only the briefest of interruptions, but elsewhere delays brought a reduction of overs and an adjusted DLS target.

None of this made much difference at Thurlede, where Excelsior ‘20 had played themselves into a winning position before the rain arrived.

First, they held Dosti United to a modest 151 for nine, a total which represented a considerable recovery from 46 for five and which was mostly due to a marathon, 105-ball 38 from skipper Vinoo Tewarie and a fighting 48 not out from Anees Davids.

That never seemed like a defensible total, and when rain drove the players from the field openers Tim Etman and Roel Verhagen had already put on 89 in 22 overs to drive home the advantage.

When play resumed the match had been reduced to 46 overs and the target to 142, but Etman and Verhagen needed only 35 overs to finish the job and seal the 10-wicket victory. Etman finished with 66 and Verhagen with 63.

The margin pushed Excelsior’s net run rate above that of HBS and saw them move to the top of the table with one round of matches left before the competition reaches the half-way mark.

HCC moved level with ACC, consolidating their position in fourth, with a six-wicket victory over VOC Rotterdam at Hazelaarweg.

The home side battled their way to 198 for nine in their 50 overs, the lion’s share of the runs coming from the international trio of Max O’Dowd (54), Pieter Seelaar (41) and Scott Edwards (36), but 77 from skipper Tonny Staal and an unbeaten 52 from Bryce Street saw HCC home with seven overs to spare.

The other game where the weather caused a DLS result was at Voorburg, where despite a third-wicket stand of 130 between Eric Szwarczynski (33) and Ben Cooper VRA were dismissed for 189.

Cooper’s 107 from 110 deliveries, his second century of the season and like the first coming in a losing cause, was a fine effort, but his dismissal triggered a collapse in which the remaining five wickets fell for just 19 runs, Clayton Floyd running through the tail to finish with three for 24.

Earlier, Viv Kingma had once again put the opposition on the back foot with two quick wickets, while Philippe Boissevain removed both Peter Borren and Cooper to initiate the VRA decline.

As at Thurlede, the die was pretty much cast at Westvliet before the rain intervened, with Voorburg well ahead on DLS at 89 for two from 18 overs.

When play could be resumed the match was cut to 33 overs and the target (coincidentally) to 142, and Noah Croes and Nic Smit were untroubled in carrying on where they had left off, having been given a good start by Tom de Grooth (38) and Matt Smit (17).

They took Voorburg home without further loss, finishing on 33 and 45 respectively and reaching their target with almost seven overs remaining.

Despite the rain sweeping through there was a full match at Sportpark Bermweg, where Sparta 1888 secured a comfortable six-wicket victory over Quick Haag.

The departure of New Zealander Rupert Young forced a change in the Quick top order, Hayden Brain promoted to open along with Jay Bista, and after the early loss of his partner and of Abhinav Gill, he demonstrated his value with a solid 51.

Sharing stands of 43 with Lesley Stokkers (23) and 67 with Geert Maarten Mol (31), he saw the total through to 126 before he was fifth out, and then Daan Vierling (33 not out) and Jeroen Brand (30) combined to enable Quick to reach 199 for eight.

When Prathamesh Dake removed both Sparta openers in one over it seemed as if that might be enough, but Garnett Tarr took the game away from the visitors with a magnificent 116, made from 120 balls with 13 fours and four sixes.

Keeping his side ahead of the DLS rate all the way, he brought Sparta to within 19 runs of victory before he was bowled by Mol, and old stagers Mudassar Bukhari and Atse Buurman then knocked off the remaining runs to complete the win with more than three overs to spare.

The victory keeps Sparta in touch with the mid-table group but for Quick, just one win ahead of bottom side VRA, a nervous second half of the season looms.

Rod Lyall 09/06/19

With two matches falling victim to weather which the Dutch Meteorological Institute assures us is normal for this time of year, there was still plenty of interest in Saturday’s Topklasse matches.

Heavy overnight rain and a storm-borne succession of showers left De Diepput unplayable for normal cricket (which didn’t stop the Saturday-afternoon recreational players moving onto it as soon as the match between HCC and ACC was abandoned), while gale-force winds treated the Westvliet sightscreens as their plaything and caused the match between Voorburg and Dosti United to be called off as well.

The shortest of the three games which did get played, a 30-over affair between HBS and Excelsior ‘20 at Craeyenhout, was one of the most significant matches of the round, and turned out to be a last-over thriller.

After Tobias Visée won the toss and elected to bat, the Excelsior bowlers showed greater discipline in the gale-force winds than they had in balmier conditions earlier in the season, but the HBS top order seemed relatively untroubled in reaching 195 for four.

The highlight was a third-wicket stand of 77 between opener Zac Elkin and Sharn Gomes, the latter making an enterprising 34-ball 43 while Elkin batted throughout the innings for his unbeaten 77. There were smaller contributions, all at better than a run a ball, from Visée himself, Wesley Barresi and Zak Gibson.

Sohail Bhatti was the most economical member of the Excelsior attack, conceding just 22 runs in his five overs and claiming Barresi’s wicket.

The Schiedammers began cautiously on what was a fairly demanding chase, and even after both openers had gone the Caribbean partnership of Lorenzo Ingram and Branton Parchment took some time to gain momentum, leaving one wondering whether the task might not be beyond them.

Past the 15-over mark, however, the boundaries started to flow, and by the time Parchment was caught behind off Barresi for a 31-ball 37, the pair had added 82 runs in fourteen overs.

Ingram went on to make 79 from just 58 deliveries, batting with ever-greater confidence and hitting ten fours and a six, and when he holed out to Berend Westdijk at long on trying to hit Gibson into the Bosjes van Pex, only 19 were needed from 16 deliveries with four wickets in hand.

HBS fought to the last, but Sanjit Shankar and Umar Baker were equal to the task, Baker finishing it with a straight six off the penultimate ball.

One curious feature of the Excelsior innings was replicated, almost at the same moment, in the match between VRA Amsterdam and Quick Haag in the Amsterdam Bos: in both games the force of the wind caused the removal of the bails, and just at the same time that Tim Etman was surviving a claim that a Wessel Coster had nicked the stumps on its way through, Quick’s Bobby van Gigch had the better of a similar appeal by Vikram Singh.

Neither batsman survived much longer, but in the match in Amstelveen the crucial dismissal was that of Quick opener Jay Bista, who made 75 before being caught by Leon Turmaine off the bowling of Ben Cooper.

At that point, Quick had been 102 for one chasing VRA’s total of 185 in 40 overs, a score which they had reached thanks to a splendid 80 from former international Eric Szwarczynski, who shared a fourth-wicket stand of 73 with Peter Borren (35).

Of the remining VRA batsmen only Mitch Lees (24) reached double figures, while for Quick the new-ball pairing of Prathamesh Dake and Jay Bista claimed two wickets apiece.

Once Bista had been dismissed, with 84 still needed off 18 overs, the VRA attack fought back, restricting the scoring and forcing the batsmen into rash strokes.

Turmaine, Ben Cooper and Borren each took two wickets, and the asking rate gradually rose beyond achievable levels, with 34 required off the last three overs.

Quick could only manage 23, and VRA completed their first win of the season, with a margin of 10 runs.

At Hazelaarweg VOC Rotterdam, after a disappointing start to the season, had a comfortable 126-run win over Sparta 1888 in a match reduced to 36 overs.

But their top order once again failed to fire, and it took a sixth-wicket stand of 93 between Scott Edwards (41) and Jelte Schoonheim to enable them to recover from 54 for five and finish with 204.

Schoonheim played his first significant innings of the season, his 66 coming from 56 deliveries, with eight fours and two sixes.

The initial damage for Sparta had been largely caused by seamer Dost Muhammad, playing his first match of the year, who took four for 21 in just four overs.

204 turned out to be more than enough, as the Capelle side collapsed to 78 all out in less than 19 overs. Pierce Fletcher (three for 20) and Ashiqullah Said (three for 22) reduced them to 45 for five, and then Ramdas Upadhyaya ran through the middle and lower order for figures of four for 27, his best return in the Topklasse.