The Cricket season concluded this weekend with a block fixture against Caterham School. It has been another enjoyable summer with over 100 fixtures played as well as House matches and training sessions. It has been great to see so many students involved in what has been predominantly a beautiful summer weather-wise.
Friday afternoon saw Under 12A, B, C and D team matches taking place at Eltham in the glorious sunshine to mark the end of field week. There were some superb performances across the sides as Eltham won all four games. The As put up an excellent total with the bat thanks to contributions from Max, Ollie and Ben and Matthew which proved too many from Caterham to chase. A wicket first ball for Alex helped the Bs to a comfortable victory with Alex and Dylan betting well. Both Fred and Erik took two wickets in the C team match as they and the Ds ran out winners too.
The Under 13s travelled to Caterham on Saturday morning and the As recovered well from a tough start as Reuben was the pick of the bowlers to restrict Caterham to 128. Despite 42 from Oliver in reply, we fell 10 runs short. The Bs picked up an excellent victory with Ishaq scoring 66 in our total of 140 which proved too much for Caterham who were 80 all out.
The Under 14As had an interesting match at Caterham. Some disappointing bowling and fielding from Eltham gave away far too many runs as they scored 164 batting first. At this point, the pitch started misbehaving drastically as balls rolled along the floor or disappeared over batsman and wicket keeper’s head more and more regularly. It was decided to move the match to a neighbouring ground which was free to get the game in and Eltham benefited from some smaller boundaries to chase down the score with Fergus batting brilliantly. The Bs had a very close match but unfortunately lost by two wickets in the end.
The Under 15As and Bs both had excellent matches despite five of the usual A team playing up in the 1st XI. Well done to Joe, Rikin, Reyhan, Yusuf, Ben and James who have all played and made good impacts in the 1st XI this summer – this bodes well for next year and the future. The 15As batted first and made an excellent 168 with James and James B making good contributions, but we couldn’t entirely defend it on a good wicket and fast-scoring ground. It was a similar story in the Bs as our total of 126 in 20 overs wasn’t quite enough.
The 2nd XI finished off their season with a narrow defeat at home to Caterham in a Twenty20 match. Eltham finished on 123-5 chasing 138 to win despite an excellent 51 from James who was playing in his first match of the season.
The 1st XI finished off their excellent season with a great 5 wicket win at Caterham with Nico scoring an incredible 157 not out as we chased 238 in 50 overs. Early wickets for Nico and Ben gave us a good start in the field and it was great to see Year 10s Rikin and Reyhan picking up wickets too although Caterham batted well to score 237-9 from 50 overs. Ken and captain Sam gave us a good start in reply before Nico made his match-winning contribution. He shared a 100 run partnership with Year 10 Joe Bilsby who scored 20 before seeing the side home in collaboration with another Year 10, Ben. Nico’s innings came off just 105 balls and was a fitting way for him to end his Eltham career. Both and Sam and Nico have scored 4 fifties and 2 hundreds this summer while totalling over 500 runs and have been two of the finest players to come through the school in recent times. We wish them all the best alongside the rest of our Upper Sixth leavers who played their final school match last weekend.
