By Steve
With the first week of schools coaching behind us and over 2000 children coached, Saturday heralded a CWB Festival with two teams from the schools of Ndeera, Kari-guini and Murang’a.
With two groups of three teams, playing 10 overs per side, the day kicked off around 10.30am under clear sunny skies. The elder statesmen of the group as Luke aptly called us (Julian and myself) were on umpiring duty taking a pitch each whilst Tracey and Robbie took care of the scoring. Nicholas co-ordinated the children on the sidelines with the rest of the team running drills and keeping children occupied that were not involved in the festival.
What I find amazing though not surprising, is the fact that if a similar event was run in the UK you would have parents, extended family and teachers encircling the boundaries watching. We had nearly 70 children that had all made their own way to the ground, a couple of teachers present but they were from the host school not the visiting ones and not a single parent.
From the group stages we had a final, 3rd place play-off and 5th v 6th with some local CWB rivalries kicking in. I got the final to umpire whilst Julian took the 3rd place play-off. Greg stepped in to run 5th v 6th. The battle of the scorers was the most controversial with Tracey being given the final over Robbie much to the Dutchman’s annoyance. He stormed off throwing his pen away and refusing to continue!!
A team pile-up with the guys jumping on top of him on the lower field brought him round.
A few things stood out for me today.
Firstly, the standard of bowling. There was little evidence of throwing with 95% of deliveries bowled with a straight arm and a good many of those were really quite accurate.
The batting showed evidence of technical improvement and there were a couple of big hitters on show. One young boy Robert despatched three sixes and a four over the boundary in one over on my field and 14-year-old Susan – wearing a red tutu – had a bowling performance of note in the group stage which included a maiden over and two wickets in two balls (both clean bowled).
There is huge potential in the raw talent on show today and my only hope is that local teachers and coaches start to get more actively involved than we’ve seen this week. Our sessions have served as more of a break for the teachers than being coach education so that they can continue the work in our absence.
The down side of an otherwise great day was the fact that we managed to get three group games of 20 overs each and a final of 20 overs on each pitch in the time that it took our hotel to make a club sandwich for lunch!
The overall honour for the day went to Kari-guini A who won off the very last ball of the match against their own B team. Two runs ahead with a ball to go, the Kara-guini B succeeded in top edging a catch to deep square leg resulting in a five point deduction and three run win for their schoolmates.