Kieran Lloyd leads Appleby to yet another victory
Appleby, Southland Boys' High School, and Invercargill-Old Boys were victors in Southland's ILT Premier League club cricket competition on Saturday.
Kieran Lloyd has been dominating Southland’s senior club cricket competition with the bat but on Saturday it was with the ball that he led Appleby to another victory.
Marist restricted Appleby to 151 batting first at Queens Park with Jaron Drozdzak and Mitchell Harvey leading the way with the ball taking four wickets each.
With the likes of Tobias van den Heever and Shaun Fitzgibbon in its batting artillery Marist would have been relatively confident as they pondered the chase.
However, Lloyd had other ideas as he played the lead role in reducing Marist to 49 for six. He finished with figures of 9-2-33-6 as Marist was bowled out for 100, 52 runs short of victory.
Both Appleby and Marist will qualify for the playoffs with Appleby at the top of the table and Marist sitting clear in fourth place ahead of the Metro Tigers and South Boys’ High School.
Southland Boys’ picked up a thrilling one-wicket victory over the Tigers in the game played at Metro’s home ground at Queens Park on Saturday.
Metro posted 147 batting first. Geoff Folster top-scored with 27 and Dylan Hawkes and Lachie Reily both picked up four wickets with the ball.
At 88 for eight in reply, Southland Boys’ was struggling before Shahen Wijesinghe (28 from 59 balls) and Will Cairns (27* from 57 balls) teamed up producing two mature match-winning knocks.
They advanced the team to 145 for eight before Wijesinghe departed.
It meant the final pairing of Cairns and Charlie Hopcroft still needed three runs to win which they managed to get.
The victory will give Southland Boys’ some confidence heading into its interschool against Shirley Boys’ High School from Christchurch on Monday and Tuesday in Invercargill.
It was a low-scoring affair in the third ILT Premier League 50-over fixture on Saturday with Invercargill-Old Boys’ picking up a two-wicket victory over Waikoikoi.
Waikoikoi only posted 128 batting first, but they had Invercargill-Old Boys eight wickets down when Invercargill-Old Boys finally overhauled the target.
Both Waikoikoi and Invercargill-Old Boys are playoff bound with one more round-robin round to be played before the crunch stage of the season.