Cricketers prepare for CIYMS after weekend washout

BALLYMENA’S First XI had no cricket on Saturday for the second successive week after heavy rain had left the Lisburn ground unplayable.

Indeed it could have been three weeks without cricket, had Ballymena not previously agreed to rearrange their scheduled June 30th home league game against CIYMS for next Saturday.

With three league defeats already Ballymena will be hoping for a change of fortune against the Belmont side. However CI will be tough opposition. Not for the first time, they recruited heavily over the winter - Irish international Jeremy Bray, Ireland A batsman Chris Dougherty and Zimbabwean Ryan Butterworth are among several new signings.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Perhaps not surprisingly, they do not seem to have gelled as yet as a team. Bray’s batting has brought them a couple of good victories, but Lisburn beat them convincingly in the Senior Cup and Waringstown outplayed them in a league game.

Indeed Bray has been the only one of their new signings to really impress and certainly their batting looks to be stronger than their bowling.

Hopefully the Eaton Park batsmen can use this opportunity to bounce back to form. The fact is that Ballymena need to score big totals to win games and , so far in 2012, too many of their more experienced batsmen have struggled.

Kaushik Aphale has been the exception and has played several outstanding innings already, but without much support other than from younger players Robert McKinley and William Montgomery.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

However this Ballymena team has the potential to score “big runs” and if they can do that on Saturday against a far-from-deadly CI bowling attack, then Simon McDowell and his players could well be celebrating a first league win of the season on Saturday evening.

Before Saturday, Ballymena have an important engagement in the Twenty 20 Cup against Waringstown at Eaton Park to-morrow evening (Wednesday) at 6.15p.m.

Ballymena have done well this season in the shorter form of the game; wins against Lisburn and Carrick have left them with a great chance of qualifying for the semi-final stages.

If they beat the men from The Lawn, they will definitely be through.Indeed even a narrow defeat may well be enough to ensure a semi-final place, unless Carrick beat Lisburn by a big margin to overtake Ballymena on Net Run Rate.

Related topics: