Well the “Muir Four” are now back at The College for our final two weeks of our stay in Uitenhage and we are all hoping to make the most of the short time we have left and to score a few more runs and take wickets in the final few games for the school. We also have “The Founders Week” to look forward to at school and we will all be playing in the Inter-house cricket competition.
Last Monday the rest of the Leinster squad left South Africa to head back to Dublin after a great tour of Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg. The Squad Arrived in Port Elizabeth two Sundays ago (15th of February.) The tour started off in Port Elizabeth where Leinster played two matches against Grey High School and Muir College in warm up games before the festival in St. Stithians School.
Our first match was a tough match against Grey but unfortunately we came out second to a strong under 15’s side where we came up short by 20 in the run chase.
The next day we played Muir first team on a very hot Uitenhage day. David and I played for the Muir team which was very interesting when we went out to bat against our fellow players .Leinster came up on top in this encounter by a 3 runs in another great game. It was a good start to our tour and I think we did well in our warm up games considering we had four sets of gear to share around amongst 15 players.
Last Thursday (20th of February) the squad headed up to St. Stithians in Johannesburg. It is a fantastic school which had unbelievable facilities, 8 cricket pitches, 2 hockey pitches and 2 swimming pools and they were great hosts to all the schools taking part in the cricket festival.
We played our first game on the Friday against a good side from St. Johns School, Johannesburg. We had a good start batting first making 208 with a Rory Anders contributing 60 to the score. Unfortunatly we couldn’t finish the second innings due to lightning sirens at school going off so we were forced to draw in a game when we well on top.
The next day we played Clifton School from Durban, in probably our best batting performance of the tour in Colin Currie and Rory Anders both made fantastic hundreds in a 200 run partnership which was undoubtedly the match winner for us. Their partnership was almost over shadowed by James Meier scoring 64 of just 20 balls including 9 sixes. At this age group I have never seen such power in a 15 year old boy. We made 304 and won the game comfortably.
In our third game we lost to our hosts St. Stithians in another great game by 20 runs. In the first innings we had a great bowling performance in bowling Saints our for 123. David Delany and Fionn Hand did most of the damage picking up four wickets each but all the bowlers contributed to that success. Unfortunatly the batting department let us down that day which was a real shame considering how dominant we were the day before and we were bowled out for a disappointing 101.
Our final day we played St. Andrews School from Grahamstown in a T20 game on the main field. We batted first and made a very good total of140 probably the main partnership between Fiachra Tucker who made 23 and Cameron Shoebridge who made 57. Some good batting at the end by Stephen Keane got us up to a very defendable total. In the second innings some good bowling especially from David Murphy and Josh Little were too strong for the Andrew’s boys and was another convincing win for the Leinster Team. Overall it was a very successful tour for us winning 3 out of our 6 games and a tour that should definitely should be repeated in the future years.
A special thanks to Brian O’Rourke, Heatley Tector, Runeshan Moodley (Muir College), Bryn Thomas and Peter Searson for all the effort and work they put into the tour to make it such a great success. I’m sure all the lads would agree that it has been the experience of a lifetime.