Generated with Avocode. Generated with Avocode.
8th February 2011

Claydon checks in – final in sight!

After settling in to my new house for the next month I didn’t have that much time before I was heading away again.  I was getting picked up by the coach and then we were getting a flight to Wellington, then another flight to new Plymouth as we were playing Central Districts the next day.

We arrived at 3.00pm,  had a run about doing some training then headed to the hotel for a team meal.

We arrived at Pukekura Park and I had to have a look around, it’s the ground and team where Durham boy Ian Blackwell played his twenty20 cricket over Christmas and he had said it was something special.  He was spot on, it was an amazing cricket ground.

We won the toss and on a very small, I mean very small ground, we batted well throughout the innings.  Bob Nicol got a 100 and everyone else chipped in around him, we posted 296-6.  We bowled and fielded well throughout the innings and managed to get them out for 245.  I got 1-39 off 10 overs.

We had to catch a flight back to Christchurch, which was a one and half hour journey.   We had the morning off, which was nice! Then we had to meet at the gym for a 30 minute cycle class and then recovery session with Mad Max.

Well it’s been the first morning we have been home and I spent two hours on Skype talking to my fiancée Kat as she has gone back to the North East of England.  She is putting in all the hard work preparing for our wedding at the end of the year, I had to make sure everything was going to plan and it was as I expected!

We had to drive to our next game so we set of at 2.00pm to drive to Timaru, which is about two hours away.    

We go into today’s game against Otago and we know if we win we finish top after the eight rounds of games.  If we finish top we get two chances, by that I mean if you finish 1st or 2nd  you then play off and the winner goes straight through to the final and the loser plays the winners of 3rd and 4th  ,  so there was a lot to play for.
We lost the toss and for the first time this series we was going to field first.

We managed to get them out for 221 and I managed to pick up my best one day figures of 4 – 39 so that was nice.  We lost a few wickets early but Shannon Stuart 70* and Ellie 40* managed to see us home.

We then sang the team song very loud and were now looking forward to a home semi final to Auckland on Sunday. 

[The side won the semi final and will play in the final on 13 Feb]