Congratulations to Edinburgh South, a young club, that has played its way through the ranks of East of Scotland cricket to win a place with the “Big Boys” next season. You earned your place by being better than us on the day! Good luck in 2025!
We fell just short of our major ambition for this season and can only reflect on what might have been. On the day too many of our leading batsmen missed out. None of our first four in the order made as much as twenty. More often than not this means you will lose!
This match started spectacularly well; our strike bowler, Lewis Munro, yet again removed an opener, this time Kamram Uddin, for nought in his opening over. Whereupon, Edinburgh rallied with a productive, though not chanceless, partnership between Asad Amir and Adnan Mufti, a player considered pre-match to be a real threat. Cameron Brown then stepped up and struck the top of Mufti’s off-stump; one dangerman was gone! Asad Amir battled on however, with a mixture of solid, defensive play and some adventurous, arguably risky, scoring shots to record an innings of 71 runs. Despite the best efforts of Lewis, Cameron and James Robb, Edinburgh managed a total of 221. Spare a thought also for Luke Bain who bowled very accurately to concede only 2 runs per over in his 9 overs, without managing any wickets; Luke has bowled extremely well in recent weeks with no luck. In all this was not a bad performance by the seamers; we did however miss the bowling arm of off-spinner, Manu Saraswat, who was on u19 international duty.
Chasing 212 at just over 4 runs per over was far from impossible, but after the disastrous opening to our innings, it looked very hard indeed. Rutwik Hegde has been a consistent stand-out in the seconds all season. He did his best to steady things in this match by scoring 44 runs and along with Cameron Brown, he edged us back into the contest albeit briefly. When this pair departed, the game was up.
A winnable match was gone! We remain a Strathmore Union club for another season!