Port Elizabeth Academy lose first competitive match

Chris Liddle reports from the Port Elizabeth Academy and the bouys have played their first competitive match against Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.

Our first competitive match against the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Weather conditions: very sunny all day with a light breeze until midday and heavy winds forecasted after that.

We arrived at the ground nice and early to get a good quality warm up in and net practice. Matt Machan was elected captain for the day and he won the toss and chose to field first.

Myself and Rags opened the bowling. I was a little nervous, as the last time I bowled competitively and fully fit was Dubai pre season last year. The nerves settled 4th ball into my first over when I had a nice caught and bowled. I was very happy with my first spell.

The weather forecast was unfortunately correct and just shortly after the first power play finished the wind picked up and made it very difficult for bowlers to bowl from one end. I think we were missing a spinner in this game as all our bowlers were seamers and we were quite behind the over rate.

I then came back to bowl at the death and managed to get some good yorkers in and claimed two wickets with my death bowling, which I was happy with having not practiced bowling at the death for a long time. I finished with figures of 8 overs, 3 wkts for 41 runs having only gone for 3 boundaries.

Our fielding let us down today. There were no dropped catches or missed half chances, but too many singles and twos allowed something that definitely needs to be improved for the next game. NMMU finished with 269-8 off their 40 overs.

We got off to a good start with Mach and Dexter opening up. We were on 47 from 5 overs, with Dexter on 5. I think you can tell what mood Mach was in!!

After that start we all thought we had a very good chance of winning, but unfortunately we had a mini collapse and stumbled to 70 for 3 and then 100 for 6. No one really made big runs apart from Mach, who got 42, and Nick Lee getting 70. We ended up 219-8 from our 40 overs.

It was a disappointing start for us out here, but there were plenty of positives to take from it and things we can work on for our next game against NMMU next week.

MD academy 0 - NMMU 1