Just a quick update from Durban in South Africa and in particular our stay at the most impressive Glenwood High School. We return home in early April and we are really enjoying this experience so far.
A few weeks ago, we went to the Tala Game reserve and got too see many animals we had never seen before.
Following that, we went to see the last day of the Dolphins v Cobras 4-day game at Kingsmead.
That same weekend, we played Clifton College in an easily won battle beating them by 8 wickets.
The following day myself Stuart, Neil and Richard went to the Gateway shopping centre, which is the biggest shopping centre in the whole of South Africa.
Friday 25th and Saturday 26th consisted of Neil and myself umpiring games at the annual Glenwood High cricket festival. Eight different schools from around the province of Natal were participating along with one from Johannesburg. Richard and Stuart acted as liaison officers for two of these schools.
When we have time, we visit Glenwood Primary school to help with the PE and cricket training sessions. Cricket is the number one sport for most of the young children. We have been helping with simple batting and bowling drills and we umpire games to finish each session.
Last weekend were the last league games of the schools season here. Unfortunately, we lost by 4 wickets but was a closer game than it sounds. This weekend we are playing some club cricket with local side Topham CC who play in the Durban leagues.
Neil and I are now playing 1st team, which means we still have more games to play. As we won the KZN schools T20 cup recently we now play at Stellenbosch, Western Cape and represent the Dolphins in the Cricket South Africa T20 challenge. The series will be televised on TV (Super Sport) from March 24th - 26th. We are counting down the days for that and we will be training every day in preparation.
We luckily met with Dolphins ‘B’ player Okuhle Cele who is an old boy here at Glenwood High School and has gratefully been able to do some 1:1 work with each of us at school.
We are all most thankful to Cricket Leinster and Glenwood High school for making this trip possible and we look forward to our remaining three weeks here in South Africa.
Andrew Brawders
Phoenix CC & St Declan’s College