The Stevenson & Taylor CHB country T20 competition delayed after Waipawa River tried to take over playing field

Waipawa's WACA cricket field after floodwaters delayed play by two weeks.

Anyone who thought the Black Caps’ one-run win over England was as exciting as cricket gets should have been at Coronation Park recently to witness the spectacular drama of the Wallingford and Waipawa game.

Round three of the Stevenson & Taylor CHB country T20 competition was delayed two weeks due to the Waipawa River trying to take over the playing field.

With great help from the mowing team, the field was cut four times in seven days to allow junior and senior cricket to be played.

Waipawa was sent in to bat on the skidding turf that received 6mm of rain the previous night and proved to be very difficult to bat on.

Good bowling lengths and tight fielding from Wallingford demanded that the only way to score more than singles was to play good shots.

Unfortunately for Waipawa the good shots must have been lost in the flood because by the 14th over they had only scored 46, losing all known good batsman cheaply.

Fortunately Matt ‘the batt’ Wynn had been at rugby training for the last month and was fit enough to run many quick singles and earned himself his new top score of 32 while dragging the team up to a meek score of 86 for 9 after the 20 overs.

A notable moment for Wallingford was Marcus ‘Sparky’ Schaw’s catch of a ball that went into orbit for a brief period and came back with ice forming on the ball.

‘Sparky’ had said afterwards that if it had not been for him having his hands in his pockets all innings they wouldn’t have been warm enough to catch the icy ball.

With the target set at 87 it was going to take something special for Waipawa to restrict the visitors but stand-in captain Hamish Adam was not afraid to set an aggressive field for the whole innings and open with his best wicket takers to start strong.

Kade ‘Red’ Wynn answered the call and had an impressive bowling spell, taking two wickets for nine runs off three overs and inspired the rest of the team to follow his lead of taking wickets while choking the runs.

Scoreboard pressure can do funny things to teams and once the asking rate got above six per over the wheels started falling off the Wallingford wagon.

Wickets were tumbling at an alarming rate then miscommunication and middle-aged running caused two run outs and by the end of the 19th over Waipawa had them eight wickets down with three runs needed. The fielders could be compared to vultures the way they had circled the on-strike batsman Kurt ‘dead meat’ Mackie and with all the pressure applied he soon had softly spooned it to a close-by fielder.

No wickets in hand and Sam Morrah on strike it would seem that Waipawa were about to pull off a great escape but as it would turn out there wasn’t enough luck for two matches to do that in the same week.

Wallingford hit the final runs with two balls to spare and finished the round top of the table undefeated- another greatly contested game in this wonderful country social competition.

The next game between Onga-Tiko and Sherwood in the coming weeks will decide who will face Wallingford in the final to be held on April 2 at Coronation park. For more details about the finals look for updates on the CHB Cricket or Waipawa Cricket Facebook pages or listen to Central FM community notices.