Smashing Whacking Cricket

Friday 24th June was the Cricket Teams turn to represent Hamstel at Shoeburyness High School. After weeks of practice, giving up their lunch times to learn the rules and develop their techniques, the whole team were ready and raring to go. We were competing against 9 other schools. The teams were split into 4 groups to try and qualify for the ‘Super 6’. The team were on it from the start and were selected by Mr Edwards to demonstrate the rules to the other teams. Our first game started well with the bat against Earls Hall and all the team scored highly and managed to get bonus runs through the gates. The fielding was equally on point, limiting the Earls Hall Team to not too many runs. This gave us a comfortable win. The next game followed straight after against Our Lady of Lourdes, they had been resting and unfortunately we ended up fielding first. The hot afternoon sun and back to back games definitely slowed our fielding down in the second game and let Our Lady of Lourdes get a few more runs than they should have. It was down to our batting to try and chase down the score. We had big hits fr

om Michael, Waseem and Ruby which got the score moving but with just Corey to go we needed 12 runs, more than anyone had scored in the whole game. Corey’s precise hitting meant he scored 4 bonus runs and his speedy running got his total up to 10. A great effort from Team Hamstel but unfortunately a narrow lose.

The team had a rest and a drinks break before finding out which schools had qualified for the ‘Super 6’. Team Hamstel qualified as runners up from our group so went into a group with Thorpedene and Prince Avenue for our ‘Super 6’ games. Riley who had been working so hard, scored well and was a great team player by helping to build Team Hamstel’s efforts and motivation in our games. The team gave their all but after the long afternoon and a couple of mistakes in the fielding gave Thorpedene and Prince Avenue too many runs that we couldn’t quite chase down. This meant the team finished 5th out of the 10 schools. Mr Sayer and Mrs Walker were very proud of the team work and sporting manner in which they played. Well done Team Hamstel, you represented the school with pride and showed all the right values in winning and losing.