Cape Town - The two Western Cape teams enjoyed a hugely profitable day at St George’s Park yesterday, with both the Paarl Rocks and Western Province Blitz earning bonus-point victories in the Cricket South Africa T20 Challenge.
This had a massive impact on the standings, with the unbeaten Province securing their place in the semi-finals by virtue of their 84-run victory over the North West Dragons.
The Rocks, meanwhile, polevaulted up the log from sixth position into semi-final contention in third place with their 44-run despatching of the Lions.
WP Blitz certainly issued a serious statement of intent in the afternoon game.
Although the WP batters managed to post a competitive total of 164/8 – courtesy of a half-century from Jonathan Bird (53 off 44 balls) and some lower-order hitting by captain Wayne Parnell (33 not out off 17 balls) – it was the bowling unit that simply blew away the Dragons.
Proteas left-arm seamer Beuran Hendricks set the tone with an inspired new-ball spell of 3-0-13-4. It tore the heart out of the Dragons’ run-chase, and they were simply never able to recover from 17/4 after just 3.1 overs.
Hendricks was certainly helped with some brilliant catching, in particular by Parnell, who threw himself acrobatically to his right to claim a two-handed catch goalkeeper style at mid-off.
And in true fashion of a team growing into a confident unit, WP never took their foot off the gas, with leg-spinner Junaid Dawood maintaining the pressure with an equally brilliant spell of 4-0-22-3 to control the middle overs.
Dawood claimed the important wicket of Proteas all-rounder Dwaine Pretorius, before bagging Lesego Senokwane and Nono Pongolo in successive deliveries to reduce the Dragons to 41/8.
The Potchefstroom outfit would have expected more from a contest in which they had actually reduced WP to 134/8, courtesy of Senuran Muthusamy’s impressive figures of 4/20, with just two overs remaining.
However, it was at this stage that Parnell swung the momentum in WP’s favour, which they ran with emphatically for the remainder of the match.
In the earlier game, the Rocks’ victory was also built upon their captain Pieter Malan leading from the front with a 48-ball 71 that set up his team’s total of 160/4.
This proved way too much for the Lions, who succumbed to the Rocks’ spin trio, with Shaun von Berg (3/14), Siyabonga Mahima (2/20) and Imran Manack (1/27) doing the business for the Paarl team.