Here's the report:
I will start off saying that if no one from our club is contacted regarding this match it will be extremely disappointing and this will be the last time I waste my time in doing a well thought out match review. We won the toss and elected to field the first week believing that the pitch was fairly good and that conditions would be identical in the second week. While the weather was almost identical, the pitch however was not. This has happened to us as a club last season and to my knowledge NOTHING was done about it.
This pitch was clearly water affected and with minimal to no rain in the past fortnight, I wonder how this has happened. How can a club responsible for creating similar conditions be able to get away with this? As a college side this is incredibly disappointing as week in week out the rostrevor college ground staff with no bias produce A grade wickets. Are their any penalties that apply to home clubs not capable of doing this? With points, finals and in both these clubs cases...relegation being a factor, a fine is simply not good enough!
This brings me to the umpires...I posed the question at the start of day two, how much water has been put on this and has this pitch been doctored to suit the home sides efforts? Answer-a significant amount of water was probably needed to keep this pitch from being lost. I say now that Brahma Lodge oval on 14/2/15 had the healthiest and greenest grass in South Australia and that is with Royal Adelaide golf course in mind. I was able to make a significant indentation in the pitch with my thumb, where as the week before it did not budge. Divots in the pitch were constantly produced throughout the day. The pitch surroundings had visible moisture throughout the dirt groundings. How do the umpires believe this was satisfactory and secondly were very similar pitch conditions to the previous week? Additionally the opposition was consistently allowed to get away with terrible conduct with only one weak warning. One player was derogatorily insulted, he instructed the umpire about this behaviour and nothing was done.
Please believe I understand the umpires have small resources and I am incredibly grateful for their efforts but a club cannot be allowed to hijack the competition like this and create conditions to suit their benefit with no repercussions. We are the loser and I do not solely blame the above reasons for this as we still could have and should have won this game but yet again we have a bitter taste in our mouth.
I urge something to be done to instruct umpires to pay closer attention to pitch conditions from one week to the next otherwise we should disband two day cricket as this will continue to occur. As I said previously, if nothing is done regarding this complaint then as a captain I will refuse to bother to give any decent feedback in the future as this cannot go unnoticed. All we ask for is consistent umpiring and consistent pitch conditions.
My contact number is 0433350823, email address is
lukekels@hotmail.com and you have our club secretary's number I presume and overall...what I am left with is significant regret that I opted to bowl first.
Regards,
Luke Kelly (Rostrevor College Cricket Club Captain)
Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2015 10:28 am
Didn't realise the report was posted in mycricket. I assumed those types of reports/whinges would be kept reasonably confidential. Sonofbrowny25, since you have raised the issue and I can now say, yes, I have seen the Rostrevor match report, can you explain why the pitch was wet?