Tara Murray
Riddell hasn’t quite been able to put it all together in the Gisborne District Cricket Association Johnstone Shield this season.
In what is shaping up as an interesting race for finals with seven teams fighting for finals, the bottom-placed Bombers are seemly out of contention and would need a miracle to play finals.
Bombers secretary David King said they weren’t quite sure why things weren’t clicking like they would have liked.
“It hasn’t been the season we had kind of hoped for at this stage,” he said.
“You’d have to ask [coach] Heath [Brown] what the exact answer is, but we haven’t been playing the way we would have liked.
“It’s not clicking from them.”
Brown said they had managed to keep most of the players from last season, but they weren’t able to put out the same performances as the previous season.
He said many of the young players were able to put out some good performances, but hadn’t been able to do it consistently enough to make serious runs or take wickets.
The batting has been the Bombers main downfall, with only one score higher than 160 in the first nine rounds. Many of their totals have been chased down with a number of overs to spare.
“We’re more a bowling side in terms of players,” he said. “We’ve tended to err more on that side, being bowlers more than batters.
“It’s been that way for a couple of years.”
The Bombers had the bye on the weekend. King said while they were unlikely to play finals, they wanted to finish the season on a high with a few wins and keep positive.
King said the club’s junior program continued to be strong with both their boys and girls teams, with several featuring in representative sides throughout the school holidays.
He said like many other clubs in the association, they were struggling to keep cricketers in their mid-20s, early 30s still playing the game.
The Bombers’ pain on field has been made worse, with theft of copper wiring leaving the club with no power at Riddells Creek Recreation Reserve.
Wiring was stolen from an electricity box in early December, leaving the whole reserve with no power.
“We were told last year it would be 12 weeks, so it could be out for the season,” he said.
“We have no power in the club rooms and it makes it challenging. We have a generator to run a fridge on game days, but we had a few functions planned for the end of the year.”
King said they had been lucky that the weather hadn’t been too warm on game days, as the rooms would have quickly warmed up.
The Bombers face East Sunbury in a two-dayer starting January 20.
