Morrisville’s Church Street Park on Monday witnessed the defeat of the Seattle Orcas in their Major League Cricket 2024 match against San Francisco Unicorns by a margin of 23 runs through a fairly simple chase.
The loss kept the Orcas rooted to the bottom while Unicorns climbed up to third place.
Cameron Gannon took three wickets for the Orcas after winning the toss and putting Unicorns into bat, to restrict them to 165/7 even though Matthew Short scored 56 off 32 balls.
Orcas made a fine start scoring 54 without losing any wicket at powerplay stage as they chased down 166. Pat Cummins and Haris Rauf had several blows from Shehan Jayasuriya while Ryan Rickelton faltered slightly.
After the power play, however, everything changed when England’s Liam Plunkett was introduced and he took two wickets.
For instance, they went from76/0 to 98/5 during middle term overs before Jayasuriya reached half-century followed by Klaasen who fell cheaply.
When there were just five over left and more than ten runs per over needed, Harmeet Singh together with Hammad Azam tried but failed always to get boundaries since Unicorn bowlers deftly eased off on pace using various cuts effectively.
It was thus that Corey Anderson’s men inflicted a twenty-three-run thrashing upon their opponents – Orcas – as they ended making only one hundred forty-two runs out of six wickets.
Speaking after the game, Liam Plunkett, player of the match said, “They had a good start in powerplay period but it was always going to be difficult when most balls were old. The plan was to try and maximize that phase.”
Heinrich Klaasen, who is Orcas captain, stated: “Once again we did not bat well. So far so good from the bowlers while on the other hand our batters are letting them down.”
On Jayasuriya Heinrich Klaasen commented: “That’s why he’s back in the team. He can also blow things up up front. It is good that it happened today for him and I hope that this continues throughout the rest of the tournament.” The pitch was trickier than anticipated. They bowled really well particularly Plunkett but then we also made mistakes tactically. We could have done better than that.”
“We have to win by all means,” Klaasen talked about next encounter with Sanjay Krishnamurthi. This group is nicely staggered so a win here can bump you up a couple of places. We want to go to Dallas with a win, and hopefully win there and get into the playoffs.”
Corey Anderson, captain of Unicorns team said: “Pretty good result actually. Late in their batting innings our boys did superbly well then came out strongly with ball as well.”
Anderson spoke of Sanjay Krishnamurthi who scored 30 off 21 balls as follows: “He’s young kid who has got a lot going for him. Huge pluses for him today. In terms of this game it was quite a big innings played by him at number six position where 20 odd runs are very crucial.”
About Australia Test and ODI captain Pat Cummins Corey Anderson said: “He is world class player just having him in the group speaking cricket calms the group. It is also good for team balance. We want to try and win every game, we go back to Dallas and we want to reassess quickly and hopefully we can get a bit of momentum out of this one.”
