THE road to this year’s SHDCA finals series will come to an dead end for one of either St. Mary’s-Tyntynder or RSL Saturday afternoon, with the two clubs to meet in a do-or-die clash at the Ken Harrison Reserve.
Although they find themselves in the last two spots on the ladder, they are still within striking range of the top four thanks to the evenness of the competition, which sees just six points separating second and seventh.
While the winner could potentially leapfrog their way into the finals, the loser’s season will be over.
“The last month we’ve lost a few games that we probably needed to win and that’s put a bit of pressure on us, but the message is pretty simple now – either we win or we’re done for the year,” RSL captain Oscar Hier told The Guardian this week.
“We have to win but it’s the same for them as well, they have to win too or their season’s over, so it will be a pretty intense game.”
St. Mary’s-Tyntynder will go into the match as red-hot favourites on the back of their strong recent form, having won four straight games since returning from the Christmas break.
But it isn’t just that last year’s grand finalists have found form, but rather the manner in which they are winning, with dominant wins over Barham-Koondrook and Ultima-TUF over the past fortnight.
“We’ve made it very hard for ourselves with our form before Christmas, but we’ll back ourselves in to keep moving forward with the momentum that we’ve got at the moment and hope that’s good enough for us to qualify for finals,” St. Mary’s-Tyntynder captain Nathaniel Holmes-Brown said.
“We’ve had two pretty good wins over the last two weeks and chased down both scores pretty comfortably and we just feel like a completely different side to the way we did at the start of the year.
“We’ve been pretty lucky over the last five years in that we’ve been pretty successful, but now we just have to forget about other results and know that if we’re doing our job and winning games, that’s all we can do.”
RSL’s task in keeping their season alive will be made somewhat harder by the absences of mid-season recruits Clem Miller and Matt Edwards, with the bowlers expected to be replaced by youngsters Sam Brown and Jett Hinton.
St. Mary’s-Tyntynder will also have one expected change, with all-rounder Charlie King returning to help strengthen the home team’s batting and bowling.
While the Bulldogs have some of the competition’s elite players at their disposal, including Corey Daniels, Jake Foster, Robin Sebastian and Jack Shannahan, Holmes-Brown is also wary of the threat posed by some of the Blues top end talent.
“RSL have been a team over the last four or five years that you can never really write off,” Holmes-Brown said.
“They have a couple of club legends that keep fronting up every week and performing, whether it’s the Caldwell boys or ‘Patto’ (Stuart Patterson) or Ryan Hinton.
If you get them on the wrong day, they can be really hard to beat and you have to be at your best to roll them.
“We’ll need to try and negate ‘Patto’ (Patterson) and Ryan Hinton ability to score early on, because they can often give you a chance early on and if they do you just have to capitalise on that, because if you don’t, they certainly make you pay and they make you pay very quickly.”
Although Hinton and Patterson, along with Brenton Caldwell and Paul Munro, hold the keys to the Blues posting a competitive score, Hier is also hoping for a repeat of last Saturday’s performance in the field, with a strong eight-wicket win over Wandella the result.
“What worked well for us last week was just sticking to what we do best, and that’s playing simple cricket,” Hier said.
“We had a couple of rough weeks against Nyah District and Ultima-TUF, but we had a good game last week and it was all off the back of just holding our catches, bowling good lines and good lengths and batting properly.
“If you look at their (St. Mary’s-Tyntynder) side, they have all their players back and it’s pretty much the same side that played in the grand final last year, they are a very strong side and we’ll need to be at our best to beat them, but if we play simple cricket and stick to our strengths, I think that will put us in the contest.”
