On Tuesday, the Year 5&6 Girls Cricket team travelled to Gunnersbury Park to compete in this years Featherstone SSP Cricket competition. In total, there were 9 teams competing for this years trophy and the chance to represent Ealing the West London Competition. 

We were drawn into an initial group with Dairy Meadow and Little Ealing knowing that the top 2 teams would qualify for the next round of today's competition. We had Dairy Meadow first up and were batting first after losing the toss. Our batting pairs played well together and we set a respectable score of 249 runs. We then had to try to keep Dairy Meadow below that to get off to a winning start. We took a couple of wickets but they also hit a couple of 4's and so the score was getting close. After the last ball was bowled, Dairy Meadow had beaten us by 4 runs with a score of 253.

Game 2 against Little Ealing was now a must win game if we wanted to progress to the knockout stages. Again, we lost the toss and were batting first and were quickly on the back foot as Little Ealing's bowling kept us from scoring many runs. We managed a few runs but also lost wickets and we ended up on a score of just 205. We knew that every wicket we took would also take 5 runs from Little Ealing's total so were confident that we could still put up a fight. It was a tough innings but going into the final batting pair Little Ealing were only on 211 so again we knew that 2 wickets would win us the game. It wasn't to be and Little Ealing finished on 220.

That result meant that we were out of the main competition and entered into a group with the other 3rd place finishers from the other groups. After a lunch, we were now playing for pride against Oaklands and Selborne. Our first game was against Oaklands and some good batting saw us set a score of 243. As the day progressed, our bowling was improving and we saw the result of that as Oaklands finished batting with a final score of 237 runs. Our first win!

Our final game of the day was against Selborne and we finally won the toss and opted to field first. Again, we saw our bowling improve as well as our understanding of fielding and we kept Selborne on a beatable 225 runs. Our first batting pair played great and got us straight up to 215 leaving us needing 11 runs to win from 36 balls. The runs started to slow down though and going into our last pair we still needed 5 runs to take the lead, but also still knowing that a wicket would cost us 5 runs! We held our nerve though and finished on 234 runs.

It was a great day of cricket, which saw the girls grow in confidence and skill as the day progressed. Well done to each of our girls today for representing the school so well.