Valiant effort from junior cricketers
The under 15s celebrate after taking a wicket during the e EJCCA Carnival City Cricket Festival that was held a fortnight ago in South Africa.
Their U13’s, U15’s and U17’s faced teams from the Easterns, Zimbabwe and Easterns Development, achieving some exceptional results in the process.
The best results came from the U15’s. Led by their skipper Shaun Fouche, they convincingly beat the Easterns U15’s and U14’s by 8 and 7 wickets respectively in their opening day of T20 matches.
The organisers then felt that the team was too strong for the age group and had them play a 45 over match the following day against Easterns U16, whereby the boys put up a brave fight against Easterns right until the end. Keeping in mind that 7 of the players in the Namibian squad are still U14, they managed to give the Eastern squad a big scare and ended up losing in the dying overs by 4 wickets.
The following day they were put up against Zimbabwe’s U16 team and bowled them out for a mere 184 and were looking to pull off a very surprising and convincing win. However, thanks to some brilliant up-front bowling, Namibia lost early wickets and was in some serious trouble as the game wore on. However, thanks to a great knock from number 9 batsman, Erich Wittmann, who scored 42 of 38 balls and number 10, Donovan Zealand, putting on 21 runs, the boys were in with a shout, needing just 30 to win off the last 30 balls. Unfortunately the tail enders were not able to take the win home and the youngsters ended up losing by 30 runs. Still, a great result, considering it was against a country considered to be much stronger and an age group above them.
Wanting to end on a high note, Namibia had a final T20 against the Easterns U15’s. Batting first, Shaun Fouche posted a fantastic 72 runs, leading the team to a strong 152 in 20 overs. In response the Easterns only managed 129/8, losing by 23 runs.
Namibia’s U15 was awarded the team of the festival, with Nicol Loftie-Eaton receiving the award of the most promising bowler and Shaun Fouche the most promising batsman of the festival.
