The Examiner’s Rob Shaw, Josh Partridge, Brian Allen and Ben Hann unpack and discuss the sports news across Northern Tasmania.
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Welcome to episode 27 of the Pressbox,
00:11 the Examiner's Weekly Sportscast.
00:12 We got the team back together this week
00:15 and we'll be talking cricket, cycling and netball.
00:18 We're gonna start with you, Ben.
00:19 You went to, we're recording this the morning after
00:21 the WBBL game in town.
00:22 How was that last night?
00:23 - Yes, we are.
00:24 Yeah, no, it was really good.
00:25 A lot closer game than the first game against the Scorchers.
00:28 The Hurricanes with quite comfortably their best
00:31 bang innings for quite some time.
00:33 Openers, Lazelle Lee and Alyssa Villani
00:36 was the second highest opening stand since W,
00:40 sorry, the highest since WBBL '02
00:43 and the second highest ever.
00:44 So, Lazelle Lee especially was amazing.
00:48 91 off 54, some great strokes
00:52 and ably supported by Haley Graham as well
00:54 at the end as well, who hit a quick 530,
00:56 I believe, to get their score about 170.
00:59 Ishmael, Shabdim Ishmael, the fast bowler,
01:04 was really good to start off with.
01:07 They kept the thunder to about three for 39
01:09 after about eight or nine overs.
01:11 And you're like, oh, this game's pretty much done.
01:13 And then, Fieber Litchfield came out
01:16 and with a pretty amazing watch
01:20 was just smacking them to all parts.
01:22 There is one bit I wanna talk about specifically.
01:25 There were two incidents that happened to go
01:27 in the way of the Hurricanes.
01:28 One was a stumping, which was,
01:31 I was in the press box and could see
01:34 without any aid of replay how far out of her crease
01:37 Lazelle Lee was.
01:38 The square leg umpire disagreed.
01:41 Now, that ball also happened to be one
01:43 where Lazelle Lee edged it to the keeper.
01:45 That was also not given.
01:46 So, she was out twice and stayed at the crease.
01:48 You almost forgive that and you go,
01:51 well, that sort of just happens
01:52 and they don't have aid of third umpire.
01:54 Yeah, you move on.
01:56 But then, the chase innings,
01:58 the Thunder were always unlikely to win the game,
02:01 but any chance they did have was pretty much squashed
02:04 in the second last over when umpires called time.
02:09 I was gonna say called over on the second last over
02:11 with only five legal bowls being bowled.
02:13 So, there was two wides in that over.
02:16 Obviously, one of the umpires or both
02:18 have paid one of those wides as a legal delivery.
02:22 And so, they've called over one bowl short,
02:24 effectively taking any chance away
02:26 that Thunder had of winning the game.
02:28 And at an elite level of sport,
02:32 it is not even close to being good enough.
02:36 So, I was really disappointed.
02:37 It really just like, you just watch it go
02:39 and it's hard to enjoy something that's such a good standard
02:43 when you got this going on in the background.
02:45 - Yeah, I saw a few takes on Twitter or X,
02:48 which is obviously where you get all your logistical takes
02:50 that always make sense.
02:51 But some of them were like,
02:53 if we wanna be serious about this as a competition,
02:55 we need to get serious about it.
02:57 Because to have, especially the first era,
03:00 where the game's obviously only being live streamed
03:04 through cricket.com.au,
03:05 it's not professional enough to only have
03:07 some of your games at a professional standard
03:09 and others not.
03:10 And it's disappointing to have had that.
03:13 - It's not the first time either.
03:14 - Yeah.
03:16 Moving on to local cricket,
03:17 and a week after Cricket North had a century maker,
03:19 the TCL Premier Competition had its first century
03:21 of the season.
03:22 Tell us all about it, Bardo.
03:23 - Yeah, so, Hammad Shah from Longford,
03:25 he came out, carried his bat and scored 118,
03:28 not out through the whole innings
03:29 and really gave Longford the win, effectively.
03:32 And we'll definitely feature in the TCL Team of the Week
03:36 that we're putting together later today.
03:39 But there was also another,
03:41 Jontie Manktelo fell four runs short of joining him
03:44 in the centuries.
03:45 And another fantastic individual performance
03:48 came from Dan Smith from Trevelyan,
03:50 who smacked 71 off just 32 balls
03:53 after taking four for 42 in the bowling innings.
03:55 So, he had a fair day.
03:56 - Yeah.
03:57 And moving on to Cricket North,
03:59 Brian, what's happening in that department?
04:00 - Yeah, I reckon this is one of the biggest weeks
04:02 of the season now.
04:03 We've got double headers.
04:05 So, yeah, both, we have Saturday and Sunday,
04:10 and the teams are playing one day cricket on both days.
04:15 So basically two rounds across one weekend.
04:17 And yeah, it's just great.
04:20 I think the weather's coming good.
04:23 The competition's heating up.
04:24 South Launceston have won four in a row now,
04:26 but we had some really tight games over the weekend
04:29 and a couple of blowouts, or three blowouts as well.
04:32 But overall, the competition's in a pretty healthy place.
04:36 Exciting thing on Sunday is that
04:39 the Cricket North teams are facing off.
04:42 MoBro has the bye,
04:43 but we have South Launceston playing Westbury.
04:46 And that's actually a really kind of enticing clash
04:49 'cause, as I said, South are unbeaten,
04:51 but Westbury won the two-day premiership last year.
04:54 So a really good matchup.
04:56 And then we've got Riverside and Launceston,
04:58 also a great matchup.
05:00 Riverside have unfortunately been a little bit stiff
05:03 in the last couple of weeks,
05:04 and Launceston got their first win of the season
05:07 just on the weekend.
05:08 So yeah, it's great.
05:11 It's really cool to have the local teams
05:14 facing off on Sunday there.
05:16 - And I suppose, looking at those fixtures, mate,
05:19 I suppose, how much do you think managing players
05:22 over the course of the two days
05:23 will actually factor into things?
05:24 Obviously, people don't usually play
05:26 back-to-back games of one-day cricket.
05:28 I suppose on the Sunday, how crucial will,
05:31 I guess, potentially managing your bowlers
05:32 and doing the right things after the game
05:34 factor into things, do you reckon?
05:36 - Yeah, I think a fair bit,
05:37 because the experience of reporting on this type of thing
05:41 over the years is that you're often gonna have guys
05:44 that aren't available on the Sunday
05:46 or aren't available on the Saturday.
05:48 So you could have a pretty different looking team
05:51 between the two days if you play both.
05:53 And then, yeah, as you're saying,
05:56 there's obviously the fitness aspect of it.
05:58 I don't know, it's one-day cricket.
06:01 I don't think anyone bowls too,
06:02 like it's not too intense, is it really?
06:04 Like you can bowl a max of 10 overs.
06:06 So I don't think it's too taxing on the body,
06:09 but it's certainly like a lot of concentration, isn't it?
06:12 Like whether you're waiting to bat or you're in the field,
06:16 cricket can kind of take energy out of you
06:19 in different ways.
06:20 - Yeah.
06:21 Moving on to a few other sports.
06:23 So cycling, it's a big time of the year for cycling.
06:25 A lot of the Tasmanian cyclists
06:27 that are based on the mainland or in Europe,
06:29 they go away, obviously, for the whole season.
06:31 They usually go away January, February.
06:33 They come back to Tasmania about this time of year,
06:35 and it's always nice catching up with them
06:37 and finding out how they've been going
06:38 and what their plans are for the coming year.
06:41 Just this week, I've caught up with Nicole Frain,
06:43 Hamish McKenzie, and Georgia Baker.
06:45 They're three of our best cyclists.
06:46 Nicole Frain was a national road race champion last year.
06:50 Hamish McKenzie's career is just on a huge trajectory
06:53 at the moment, and he's just had his first European season.
06:56 And Georgia Baker is the reigning
06:57 Tasmanian athlete of the year.
07:00 And I had a coffee with Georgia yesterday
07:01 about what her year involved,
07:03 how it's, I think she competed in nine countries
07:05 across three continents in the last 10 months.
07:08 So they're on the road and in planes all the time.
07:11 And Georgia's obviously very much on the radar
07:13 for Paris next year.
07:14 So it's a good time to catch up with all the cyclists
07:16 and a sport that Tasmania traditionally does very well in.
07:19 Keep an eye out for all those stories online
07:22 in the Examiner over the next week.
07:24 And it's also a big week in Tasmania for netball, Brian.
07:26 Tell us about that.
07:27 - Yeah, it was awesome.
07:28 We had a trio of Australian diamonds come to visit.
07:32 Kate Maloney, Kira Austin, and Jo Weston.
07:35 And for example, Kira Austin was kind of
07:38 the most valuable player in the World Cup triumph
07:42 in August when we beat England in South Africa.
07:46 So yeah, we had world champions, P. Rob.
07:50 And yeah, it was lovely.
07:52 Like, it was really cool because I sort of turned up
07:56 for the interview and in the distance there
08:00 at the Utah's uni, you had these three women
08:04 in their kind of bright yellow Australia,
08:07 Oz on the back, like raincoats.
08:10 And it felt, oh, this is the real deal.
08:13 And there was something special about that.
08:14 So yeah, it was just really lovely to watch the clinic.
08:17 - And the Australians that beat England
08:18 in a World Cup final, well, they're our sort of Australians.
08:21 (laughing)
08:22 - Thanks, Ben.
08:22 - It was kind of thin veiled.
08:24 (laughing)
08:27 Yeah, it was great to be world champions, isn't it, guys?
08:31 - Exactly.
08:32 - I think Nathan Lyon would agree with you
08:33 after his interviews yesterday about the problems
08:36 looming in the Cricket World Cup.
08:38 Well, that's all we've got time for this week.
08:40 The usual wrap of local sport
08:41 mixed with the international stuff.
08:43 And hopefully we'll have the same again next week.
08:45 Read all about it on Facebook, examiner.com.au
08:48 or by a paper at the newsagents.
08:50 Thanks for tuning in.
08:51 See you next week.
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