Sheffield Shield Round 2: NSW v WA @ SCG

[Carbine Chaos]

Whiteman fails again. Wouldn't be against dropping him for Inglis to send a message.

 

[wolmeister]

Whiteman fails again. Wouldn't be against dropping him for Inglis to send a message.

Agree with that. Then again he's not the only one.

 

[Phone]

funny bit of play, nsw send sommerville out as a nightwatchman as there's only one over to be bowled, so wa open with agar and squeeze another over in

 

[kane249]

NSW being made to earn it

5/88

Agar has 2 wickets, 8 for the match now

 

[kane249]

6/91

Agar with 3 now

 

[Torz]

10 for Agar!

Shame we didn't have another 50 to play with.

 

[kane249]

7/94

Scores tied, it's academic from here for NSW but good to see WA put up a fight at least.

 

[JackOutback]

Geez, 30 more runs from WA would have been pure gold.

 

[Hellgood]

Great effort by the bowlers but a bitter pill to swallow given the lack of performance by every one of the specialist batsmen.

I expected a bit of a drop off given that we won't be seeing SOS at the top of the order this year and losing the likes of NCN and Hogan, but been a pretty underwhelming start to the campaign with far too much left to too few.

Guess will just have to console myself with Agar's massive match and promising start to the summer.

NSW's Somerville has got a pretty cool story. Hard to begrudge his success even against us given the path he has taken to FC cricket. Saw a great article recently by Gideon Haigh on the lamentations of experienced yet on the fringe domestic cricketers told through the story of Steve Cazzulino. It's one of those funny ones on The Australian website that are russian roulette in deciding when to go behind the paywall and when to be good to read so will post the article and the link:

For Australian cricketers, October is a month like no other. For most it is about returning to the game after the lull of winter; for some it is when the reality of their decision to give it away sets in.

Left-handed opening batsman Steve Cazzulino grew up an elite cricketer. He played 13 first-class matches: fewer than 1000 men in Australian history have played more than a dozen. Yet the elite of that elite proved too hard to crack.

In the off-season, in his 30th year and without a state contract, two years since his last Sheffield Shield game, Cazzulino decided he could stave off the future no longer. He retired from all cricket to concentrate on a coffee business he runs with erstwhile teammate Ed Cowan, and to complete long-delayed university studies.

“There’s a great group of 21 to 22-year-olds coming through at St George,” Cazzulino says. “But there’s only so many shagging stories you can listen to before you start wondering what other 30-year-old guys are doing with their lives.”

Tripod Coffee (disclaimer: writer is a heavy consumer) has been a stimulating experience and a bit of a godsend. In the job market, Cazzulino says, others have a significant head start. “Cricket has enriched my life in many ways, been a great teacher of life lessons. But when you are up against guys of my age who’ve 10 years’ greater work experience, it can almost be a hindrance that you’ve dedicated so much of your life to it.”

Cazzulino is such a bright and personable young man with such a healthy perspective on the game that it comes as a slight surprise when he describes times he struggled with it. This is actually the second time he has quit. A prolific junior who played under-17s and under-19s for NSW, he abandoned cricket at 19 after wintering with a club in Scotland.

“It was a great life experience, but the back-to-back seasons took their toll when I returned,” he says. “On Monday I’d go to work and train; Tuesday I’d have a day off; Wednesday and Thursday and Friday I’d work and train; Saturday I’d nick off in the second over, be down on myself the rest of the weekend, which would carry on into Monday, into Tuesday, and start again.

“It was this excruciating merry-go-round where so much of my happiness was dictated by whether I was making runs. I got into this vicious habit of looking at the paper on Mondays and seeing Phil Hughes and Uzi Khawaja plundering hundreds and just thinking, ‘what on earth am I doing this for?’.”

Cazzulino worked, none too happily, as an estate agent for 18 months, before resuming cricket, peaking in 2009-10 with 1289 runs at 71 in Sydney first grade. Relocating to Tasmania in a successful search for first-class opportunities, he suddenly had status, direction, money … for as long as he was playing, anyway.

“As a 23-25-year-old, taking home $80,000 a year, you’re doing better than contemporaries,” Cazzulino says. “But where a contemporary’s income is on an upward trajectory, mine was either going to grow exponentially or stop. So where property was concerned, I was never prepared to take a leap of faith. I was always wary of being delisted and not having the income to support a loan.”

Family values stood him in good stead. “I remember one month where there were two Shield games and a second XI game, and I got my pay cheque and my gross was $16,000,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’ve made it, this is what it’s like!’

“It would have been very easy to go out and have a good time with that. Fortunately, as the son of Italian migrants who came here with nothing, I always had my dad’s voice in the back of my mind saying, ‘Save up’.”

Yet while Cazzulino followed the sensible route of undertaking a marketing degree, he felt conflicted about it. “I always wondered if going to uni was detracting from my performances, or my recovery.” He saw others, heads down, talented, focused, who still weren’t getting a go. And he worried.

Is it difficult to be a rounded person at cricket? “Absolutely,” says Cazzulino. “I think you either need to be incredibly smart or incredibly thick-skinned. I was neither. The reason Ed (Cowan) has succeeded is because he is able to learn from his mistakes; the reason James Faulkner has succeeded is because it’s almost like his mistakes didn’t happen.”

Otherwise, he says, setbacks have a way of reverberating. “Usually getting dropped in first-class cricket is the first time it’s happened to you,” he says. “Some guys even manage to defer the experience until they play Test cricket. But it’s a whole new dimension of the game for which you are unprepared.”

Cazzulino speaks from experience. Having averaged 35 for Tasmania in 2011-12 and batted most of the first day of the Shield final, he suddenly lost preferment, and felt “the lowest I’ve been in my life”. Worse, Cazzulino felt he had almost nobody to turn to. “If you’re struggling, you might ask a senior guy what you’re doing wrong. But when it’s moving away from a form slump into a minor form of depression, it’s something that, realistically, is very hard to get advice on. And it’s a bit of a taboo to seek it.

“I remember one day saying to a respected coach, ‘I don’t know what’s happening. I’m miserable. All day and every day.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s ’cos you’re not scoring runs.’ And he drew this ridiculous parallel. He said, ‘imagine if you were a lawyer and losing case after case. That would be bound to affect you.’ I look back and I think, ‘What was I doing listening to that?’ But you’re in this tight little bubble and it’s very difficult to break out.”

After being delisted by the Tigers, Cazzulino returned to Sydney two years ago and his beloved St George, but then went 19 innings without passing 45 — a waking nightmare that originated, he says now, in a tiny, morbid anxiety.

Cazzulino was afraid, he says, not so much of failure as of ignominy. “It wasn’t that I couldn’t score a run; it was the fear of getting dropped to second grade having been a first-class cricketer. Although you probably could have put me in fourth grade and I wouldn’t have scored a run.” The harder Cazzulino tried, the worse it got, culminating in a harrowing pair in February 2015. He confronted his fear, and asked to be left out; the club backed him, and were proved right.

The rest of the year, he averaged 53. “I was playing as well as I’d ever played, with freedom, and felt completely on top of my game.” And by now he was looking on, sometimes with an almost anthropological detachment, at what seemed like versions of his younger self.

“There are some blokes you see and it’s obvious they’re unlikely to progress beyond a certain point and you just want to say, ‘Get out while you still can’,” Cazzulino says. Young men playing sport, working menial jobs, not studying. “You wonder if they’d be better off focusing their energies on something more productive.”

Cazzulino wonders because he started doing the same about himself. “Late last year I had a realistic think about where I was headed,” he recalls. “Ed and Maddo (Nic Maddinson) were opening for NSW. Daniel Hughes and Nick Larkin were averaging over 100 in first grade.

“I thought, ‘Realistically I’m going to struggle from here.’ I went to Fiji for Christmas, kind of let myself go, and averaged 20 in the back half.”

Now the game is moving on, and so is Cazzulino. Will he miss cricket? “I’m grateful for everything it’s given me,” he says. “The person I am today is in large part due to the people I’ve met and the places I’ve seen through cricket.” But he laughs that he’s intrigued. “Every October I’ve strapped on the pads and put myself through hell for six months. I’m curious to see how I cope without it.”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/spo...r/news-story/522a91c4382e18cbdc97b4a89c541aa5

 

[Carbine Chaos]

Nice to see Agar have a good match, hopefully he can find his mojo on a more permanent basis.

Another poor result on the whole.

 

[The Passenger]

NSW's Somerville has got a pretty cool story. Hard to begrudge his success even against us given the path he has taken to FC cricket.

Played a ton of junior cricket with Will at Easts in Sydney. Probably 4 or 5 seasons in the same team. Also played against him in school cricket. He was a gun batsmen and a part-time off spinner as a junior. Now he's a front line off spinner and a solid guy to have batting at 8 or 9. It was definitely better having him on your team then playing against him. In one 50-over school match he and the other opening finished the innings at 0/380 or something ridiculous like that. It was properly humiliating.

He was always a really good player, but I must admit I definitely didn't think he'd be playing shield cricket after we moved on from our days in junior cricket, but am happy for him - One of the genuinely nicest guys I've met over the years. We wouldn't be closes mates or anything now, but our paths occasionally cross and we always have a chat and catch up of the old days.

 

[Phone]

Been impressed every time I've seen him bowl tbh. Obvious, but Sommervile/SOK makes for a good partnership

 

[Torz]

Whiteman fails again. Wouldn't be against dropping him for Inglis to send a message.

Inglis with a ton in Futures today. Could be a chance of happening.