General News
25 March, 2022
Young guns firing at Derrinallum
AFTER a 71-run grand final victory over Skipton at the end of February the Derrinallum junior cricket squad has been riding high, and the results from the club’s presentation night confirm the young cricketers’ dominance in the Grenville Cricket Association (GCA) under 16 competition.
AFTER a 71-run grand final victory over Skipton at the end of February the Derrinallum junior cricket squad has been riding high, and the results from the club’s presentation night confirm the young cricketers’ dominance in the Grenville Cricket Association (GCA) under 16 competition.
The club’s under 16 leading batsman, Lachlan Coutts, batted through more than 40 overs of his side’s innings in the grand final, ultimately posting a massive individual score of 171 runs and was named man of the match.
Coutts was supported by fellow batsmen Will Hinkley (21 n.o.), Angus Stewart (18), and brother Xavier Coutts (46) as the Derrinallum juniors amassed a total of 5/296.
The target was much too high for their Skipton opponents, who, despite a valiant effort, were bowled out by Derrinallum for 225 in the 49th over.
Spinner Xavier Coutts led the Derrinallum bowlers, taking 4/39, while Cody Maslin contributed 2/5 in his last game with the under 16 side.
Neave Thompson (1/1), Dillon Gordon (1/12) and Thomas Hinkley also contributed wickets to the Derrinallum cause.
Club president Drew Uren said the juniors were thrilled with their victory.
“You’re always happy when you win a grand final, and there were a lot of good individual performances among them,” he said.
“We’ve won three of the last four grand finals, so the young fellas were pretty happy.”
Uren said Lachlan Coutts’ performance was a no-brainer for the man of the match award.
“He’s got such good hand-eye coordination, he can pick a bad ball and use it to his best advantage,” he said.
“The first half of his innings he batted fairly aggressively, and with any huge score like that you’re going to give a few chances, he got dropped a couple of times in his first hundred.
“Then he came out in the second half, took it nice and slow, but still took any loose ball that was there.”
Uren said the juniors played a massive part in the club this season, often playing seniors cricket as well as juniors.
“We’ve got numbers to pick from in the seniors, but we struggle to get them every week,” he said.
“So we rely on the juniors to top us up, and this year we had four of the young fellas playing.”
Uren said the experience the juniors got in the senior side helped improve them at the junior level.
“They might look a bit out of their depth when they start in seniors, but when the go back and play juniors they stand up a bit taller,” he said.
“And once they get the hang of the seniors, some of the kids over the years have done really well there.”
A case in point this season has been junior spin bowler Xavier Coutts, who was called in through the year at the last minute for his first senior game, only to produce surprising results.
“Xavier’s a good little spinner, but we thought we might have been throwing the lamb to the wolves when we were short one day and put him on,” Uren said.
“And then he took three wickets in that game, and was a division one qualifier, fifteen wickets, with a good average.
“He actually came third in the seniors vote count, which is pretty good for a 14-year-old.”
Xavier also won the club’s bowling average for the juniors with 18 wickets at 6.55 and won the captain’s award in the senior team.
Brother Lachlan won the junior’s batting average with 441 runs at 55.13, and was runner-up for the junior Cricketer of the Year behind Angus Stewart.
Uren said he was hopeful the club could retain such talented youngsters as they moved from juniors to senior cricket.
“It can be hard to maintain the kids once they turn 18,” he said.
“They often move to Geelong, or Melbourne, or somewhere else for uni or work, but it’s good when they hang around the club and play seniors.
“It’s really hard to recruit players out here, we’re sort of at the end of our league.
“It’s the same as a lot of country towns, but we’ll just keep doing what we do, and hopefully we can improve on our seniors results next year.”
