Duffy 'fired up' for Southland homecoming with Volts
“Honestly, the Invercargill game is always a highlight on my calendar."
There’s an Otago Volts player with a touch more excitement than most about the start of the Ford Trophy competition on Saturday.
The Volts will begin their Ford Trophy 50-over per side campaign with a showdown against Auckland at Queens Park in Invercargill on Saturday.
For Otago’s newly minted all-time leading wicket-taker, Jacob Duffy, it will be another homecoming.
Duffy emerged from Southland as a promising cricketer. He was born in Lumsden before making his mark as a cricketer at Southland Boys’ High School.
He was part of the Academy Southland programme and made his Otago Volts debut in 2012 at just 17-years-of-age.
He spent many hours at Southland Cricket HQ - Queens Park - honing his bowling craft in his youth.
“I’m fired up,” Duffy said about the chance to play at Queens Park again.
“Honestly, the Invercargill game is always a highlight on my calendar. Obviously, I haven’t been able to do that lately.
“It will be great to get down and get to see the grandparents and stuff like that. It will be cool. I’m very much looking forward to it.”
Saturday’s Ford Trophy fixture will end a hiatus regarding top-level domestic cricket in Invercargill.
It will be the first white-ball Otago Volts game played at Queens Park in five years.
The Otago Volts will also play Canterbury in another one-day game Invercargill on December 12.
To add to that the Otago Sparks will play back-to-back games at Queens Park on December 9 and 10.
The home of Southland cricket was stripped of its first-class warrant of fitness status in 2021. It stemmed from ongoing drainage problems over many years at the venue, in particular at the duck pond end of the ground.
It wasn’t a problem that crept up on the Southland Cricket Association.
Successive general managers tried to address the situation at the Invercargill City Council-owned ground.
The council carried out drainage improvements in 2015 which the SCA was very thankful for.
But despite that drainage work problems remained at the duck pond end of the ground. There seemed to be some faults around the connection of the ring drain down by the large trees at the problematic end of the ground.
Questions about the state of the drainage resurfaced in March 2021 when a Plunket Shield game between the Otago Volts and the Auckland Aces was abandoned despite blue skies throughout the time the fixture was supposed to be played.
Invercargill had a lot of rain before the start of the game and part of the ground struggled to handle it.
New Zealand Cricket advised the SCA it needed to prove the ground could handle a certain amount of rain before it would regain its first-class warrant of fitness status.
The Southland Cricket Association’s quest was to get the issues sorted and have top-level domestic cricket back at Queens Park in Invercargill during the 2023-2024 season.
That has happened.
Another box SCA needed to tick in order to meet the warrant of fitness standards was a functional electronic scoreboard.
SCA - with the support of the likes of the ILT, Community Trust South, Otago Cricket, and Aotearoa Gaming Trust - has sorted the scoreboard requirement.
The Volts will be hoping Invercargill is the place it can kick-start its 2023-2024 season after a difficult start in the four-day Plunket Shield competition.
The Volts have lost three of its four Plunket Shield games with the other game finishing in a draw.
The beginning of the Ford Trophy will be somewhat of a fresh start for the Volts.
“The last few years [50 overs] has actually been our strongest format making playoffs pretty regularly,” Duffy said.
“We are very young, especially our batting lineup. You probably saw that on [Sunday], we were chasing 200 and cooked it.
“But I think we are probably more set up for white ball to be honest, so it’s exciting.”
Saturday’s Otago-Auckland game at Queens Park is scheduled to start at 10.30am.
Meanwhile, Southland’s Nick Brown and Shahen Wijesinghe have been named in the Otago team to take part in the National U19 tournament at Lincoln from December 2 to 9.
Brown and Wijesinghe both play for Southland Boys’ High School in Southland’s senior club cricket competition.