CENTRAL North’s victorious U16 boys have the chance to put the cherry on top of what has been an already fantastic year for the zone at Allan Border Oval tomorrow.
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The Bradman Cup champions will take on AW Green Shield winners Mosman in the U16s City-Country Challenge.
Formerly known as the State Challenge, the annual fixture will also pit Central Coast, as the Kookaburra Cup winners, against Parramatta.
Both will be Twenty20 matches with the U14s starting at 10am and the 16s following at 2pm.
The Central North boys head down fresh from the news this week that skipper Jye Paterson, Tamworth and Bective-East team-mate Tyson Rennie, Muswellbrook and South Tamworth’s Caleb McNeill, Moree’s Paddy Montgomery and Narrabri’s Coby Cornish had been selected in the Country sides to participate in the U16 Basil Sellers Country Boys Coaching Class and State Challenge.
It was great reward for some great efforts from the quintet, mostly with the bat but also with the ball.
The latter, particularly, in Montgomery’s case.
Assistant coach Rod Bryant thought there were a couple of other boys who were unlucky to miss out on the 28 for the challenge.
Inverell’s Jaiden Tasker was one of those.
“He had a very good Bradman Cup,” he said.
“He opened the bowling and batted higher up the order than he has ever batted, and batted well.”
Will Fort is the other he thought was unlucky, although he is part of the NSW 15s.
Their nationals are around the same time as the State Challenge.
The Bradman Cup was all 50over matches but Bryant doesn’t anticipate too much changing for the shorter format.
“There might be a slight change in the batting order,” he said.
Cornish, for instance, is suited to possibly batting higher up the order in Twenty 20.
It will all depend though on what the situation is.
“We’ve got a pretty good T20 side,” Bryant said.
“They’ve got to change their game slightly but we’ve done a lot of work in the off-season through the academy on T20.”
“And they would have been watching Big Bash furiously.”
He said they’ve spoken a lot about what the best balls to bowl were and worked a lot for the quicks on bowling a full- length yorker.
That is something Montgomery has in his armoury.
“Paddy bowls a beautiful yorker,” Bryant said.
“He’ll certainly be a go-to man in the first six overs and the last overs.”
Bryant said they also talked a lot about the fielding restrictions and how to work around them.
“The kids just need to read the state of the game and we’ve done a lot of work on that,” he said.
They’ll have to play very well to beat Mosman.
“They’ve got a very good team,” Bryant said.
“There were undefeated in the Green Shield.”
They also had three players who were in the Northern Silverbacks side that won the U14s State Challenge in Dubbo last year.