The Pink Report

Stags’ Night - Again

I’ve been thinking all day about how to avoid writing about the cricket. Quite tricky, given this is a cricket column. It’s not the Seddon Park result that’s got me ducking, but the fact I didn’t see the game myself, having been winging my way back to New Zealand at the time. I’ll count that as a small mercy, as by all accounts the 78-run loss in the big HRV Cup Twenty20 opener was pretty ugly.

The Central Stags are becoming something of a nemesis for the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights. The green machine was the team that snuffed out the side’s chances of taking out the inaugural HRV Cup last summer, at the very same venue when they met in the final round.

On paper, that one was a four-wicket win to the Stags under the Duckworth-Lewis system, but in reality the Knights had come within a fingertip of claiming that game and the right to advance to the HRV Cup final. Just one more timely boundary would have done it for the home team, but instead it was an ecstatic Ross Taylor who zoomed off the field like a man who’d just broken out of jail, having just belted the winning blow. The Knights ended up fourth on the points table and there were some very long faces after having come so close to a place in the final. They were a team that looked a lot better than HRV Cup leather medallists.

The Stags had dunked the Knights in New Plymouth, too, by 19 runs; and now they’ve elephant-gunned the side yet again, this time without their smattering of BLACKCAPS stars helping out. They’ve looked to me to be the sort of side ideally equipped to capitalise on short boundaries and love the smaller grounds like Pukekura Park and Seddon Park, whereas teams like the Knights and Aces are good workers of the ball, running the singles and grafting well on bigger parks.

Generally, though, the Stags and Knights have much in common and face similar challenges as the two sides that cast their net widely across several provinces for their talent. But when these “country cousins” get together, it seems to combust into some sort of interclan warfare.

Ah well, so much for the flying start to the pink season. At least the next game will be underway before we know it, on Sunday against the Aces at Colin Maiden Park in east Auckland. I read a wee jibe on Auckland Cricket’s Facebook home page this morning that said, “Is it wrong to feel a bit smug about the fact that the team with all the rockstars got thumped last night by the Stags? No, thought not.”

Team - there’s all the motivation you need for a big one this weekend.