Patience a virtue for Wairarapa

Wairarapa was seeking to prove that patience is indeed a virtue
in their senior men's representative cricket matches with Nelson, scheduled to be played at Queen Elizabeth Park Oval in Masterton from today through until Sunday.
Action today and tomorrow counts towards the Hawke Cup elimination series while Sunday's match is part of the Chapple Cup one-day competition.
Patience was a commodity whose value was too often overlooked at the batting crease when Wairarapa lost in both the longer and shorter versions of the game to Hawke's Bay last weekend.
There were several instances over the three days when wickets were lost not so much because of the abilities of the opposition attack but because batsmen were guilty of not playing each ball on its merits.
This was especially so in the second innings of the Hawke
Cup game when Wairarapa wasted a slender first innings lead by being bowled out cheaply, thereby virtually "gifting" Hawke's Bay eight points for the outright win they should never have got.
Mind you, there were some exceptions to the rule.
Opener Brad Edwards had a fine "double" of 58 and 47 and was the epitome of grit and determination.
In the first innings, in particular, he played and missed on numerous occasions on what could best be described as a "sporting" pitch but never allowed those indiscretions to adversely affect his concentration.
A couple of the younger players in Robbie Anderson and
Daniel Ingham didn't have
quite the same success as Edwards runs-wise but at
least their first innings displays were marked by their resolve
not to give their wickets away easily.
For most of the other batsmen the lesson was what is good enough to get them runs at club level is very often not the case at the higher level.
Bowlers will invariably sustain their accuracy for far longer periods on the rep scene and they will have better support from their fielders as well, a combination which means batsmen have to be more astute in their judgement when it comes to shot selection.
Attacking simply for the sake of attacking seldom produces the right result.
That Wairarapa have a batting order with huge potential for both the two-day and limited-overs game is undoubted but that potential will only be realised when the "brain explosions" which were all too obvious against Hawke's Bay are eradicated. This weekend would be a good starting point, wouldn't it?'
UMPIRE'S CUP
Flight Centre Lansdowne will be hell bent on revenge when they play Greytown in an Umpires Cup senior men's inter-club match at Greytown tomorrow.
These two sides last met in limited-overs action early last month and it was all bad news for Lansdowne, Greytown winning by a massive 147 runs.
Since then, however, Lansdowne have been in solid form in both the two-day and one-day arena and it was a testimony to their depth that they scored a comfortable win over Wairarapa College in an Umpires Cup game last weekend without six of their first stringers, who were on rep duty with Wairarapa.
Again tomorrow Lansdowne will be missing a similar number of their top liners but then again Greytown will have to do without their star all-rounder Seth Rance and reliable batsman Duncan Didsbury for the same reasons.
An intriguing battle is in prospect with Greytown perhaps deserving to start favourites but Lansdowne quite capable of heading them off.
The other Umpires Cup game tomorrow sees Rathkeale
College square off against arch rivals Wairarapa College at the latter's headquarters and this
too should be a hard-fought contest.