Reigning Twenty20 state champions Riverside are adamant that winning the Cricket North premiership remains the season focus over defending its title.
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The club qualified for the T20 semi-finals on Sunday, securing an emphatic 75-run win over Longford to extend their competition run dating back from 2015 to six games.
Riverside put on a modest 8/127 against its TCL rivals before rolling Longford for 52 inside 16 overs on a two-pace new Windsor Park wicket.
“The pitch was one of those pitches where it wasn’t the easiest to bat on,” Riverside captain Alex Saunders said.
“We never really got going ourselves either, so I was a bit nervous and it was probably just a below par score, really.”
Saunders believed firming a strong two-day game this season would hold its T20 campaign in good stead.
“This year we’ve sort of had more of a focus on the longer format of the game,” he said.
“A lot of the time the basic things that you do well in all formats are the keys to winning games of cricket, whether its T20 or two-day cricket.
“So we thought we would rotate the strike well, field well and had caught really well, so it wouldn’t really matter what we’re playing.”
Englishmen Jack Williams held the Blues’ middle overs together, scoring 36 off 27 deliveries that included six boundaries.
But Longford’s attack struck back to hold Riverside to just a run-a-ball finish for the final seven overs.
Allrounder Shannon Rumble was the pick of his side’s bowlers to finish with 3-43.
The Country Tigers were in all sorts from the start of the chase after tidy work from Blues spin weapon Ramesh Sundra (3-13 off four overs).
When captain-coach Josh Adams was Saunders’ second scalp, Longford had lost four wickets in four overs.
Saunders, who took 2-6 off just his four, said it was a plan to blunt the influence of the Tigers’ big guns early.
“It was always going to be a bit harder for those guys playing on turf than than on concrete and we managed to do a job,” he said.
“We didn’t want to let their good batsmen get away and we knew if we could get them out early, then we’d be right on the front foot defending that sort of lowish score.”
Riverside are just two wins from repeating the deeds of 12 months earlier that started out with 16 teams from across Tasmania under a knockout format.
Saunders said the spur to take out the statewide T20 competition would be the pride in his playing group.
“Now that we’ve come this far, we’ll be looking at going back-to-back with the state premiership sort of things,” he said.