Hollings Weekend

The last cricket matches of our school year have now been played, with a competitive weekend against our regular visitors, the Hollings XI. There is considerable tradition behind this weekend, with one of our guests having attended since as far back as 1971!

After the action packed atmosphere of the International Festival, our closing cricket weekend is of a more relaxed pace however the cricket was as competitive as always. The Saturday fixture, as is tradition, was a chance for both teams to field their strongest side and compete for the Hollings Plate in a 30 over match. On Sunday, the opportunity was given to our newer cricketers to test their skills in a competitive match setting.

With the Lyceum losing a rare toss, we were put in to bat on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately Pascal was dismissed the very first ball of the match by an unexpectedly fast yorker, immediately putting us under pressure. After a cautious first over, the brakes were removed and the Lyceum team raced to 100 inside 10 overs! The fantastic new Pitch 1, along with the lightning fast outfield allowed for free stroke making and this combined with good running between the wickets led to some fast scoring. As wickets started to fall the scoring dried up somewhat, but with 10 overs still to go Mr Harding chalked up his first Century and the first for the Lyceum team for over 10 years! He fell shortly after for a total of 101. With a total of over 200 still a real possibility our batters fought hard and with some hard hitting from Mr Jones the scoring continued with the Lyceum team finishing on an impressive 190/7 from the 30 overs. Certainly a good total and one that we would have taken at the start of the day.

Mr Jones smashes a six straight down the ground

Given the excellent batting conditions we knew we would have to bowl well to contain the batsmen and we got off to an excellent start, slowing the run rate and steadily picking up wickets. The match was evenly balanced throughout, and every time Hollings looked to be getting ahead a vital wicket was taken to reign in the run rate. In the end however, the experience of the Hollings batsmen came through and the total was overhauled with 2 overs to spare and the Lyceum team were left to rue a number of costly fielding errors.

On the Sunday both teams fielded very different line ups, with only 2 of the Lyceum team returning from Saturday. This time the Hollings team would bat first in a 20 over encounter. Many of our young Lyceum bowlers were given an opportunity to bowl and as always seems to be the case, they impressed, showed a lot of improvement already, and certainly plenty of potential for the future. It was also great to see the emergence of a new wicketkeeper with Jacob performing admirably in his first game behind the stumps. Unfortunately in the last few overs two vastly experienced Hollings batsmen really took on the attack and pushed the total up to an impressive 159/5 from 20 overs.

The Lyceum team however were not to be overwhelmed by such a large total and came out fighting. With Jacob racing to 26, and being joined by Nuri who batted superbly to reach an incredible 82 not out! Just a few weeks ago it would have been hard to envisage what we saw but our batters have come a long way and the somewhat gentler bowling attack gave our team the chance to be aggressive and really take on the opposition. With 70 runs scored from the first 10 overs it was going to take something special to reach the target of 160, but the Lyceum team never gave up and were in it right until the last ball. With 6 runs needed from the final ball it proved just too much and the Lyceum team finished just 4 runs short in the end.

All things considered it was another positive weekend of cricket and a good way to finish the school year. A number of individual milestones were reached and there are many positives we can take with us over the summer holidays. Certainly we are all already looking forward to getting back out on the cricket pitch and taking on the Old Boys at the summer games in September!