So far it’s been an unlucky start in the combined A and B Grade competition for last year’s B Grade champions, as their first match was washed out, and they had a bye last weekend. 

“We’re getting used to it now, it’s happened over the last couple of seasons,” Boorowa stalwart Phil Coggins said. 

“We’ve had a couple of training sessions and hopefully we won’t be too dusty. We’ll see how we go.” 

This weekend, Boorowa are set to face off against the Gundaroo Goats at the Boorowa Sports Ground, and Coggins is expecting a tough match. 

“In the past, they’ve been pretty competitive, so we’re certainly going into the game thinking that we’ll have a pretty competitive match against them,” he said. 

“We certainly won’t take them lightly, put it that way.” 

Although Gundaroo had an underwhelming season in 2017/18 with only two wins, they proved that they were no easybeats, as both of those victories came against eventual competition champions, the Aussie Pirates. 

Additionally, Coggins is confident that playing at their home ground will give Boorowa a good advantage. 

“It’s always a boost to play at home, we get good local crowd support too,” Coggins said. 

“Hopefully that’s gonna help us on the weekend, and hopefully we come away with a win, ideally.” 

It is set to be a perfect weekend for cricket weather-wise, as the forecast expects a clear day with a top of 26 degrees. 

The only detractor for Boorowa is the loss of their star batsman from last season, Jye Paterson. 

Paterson had a scarcely believable year in 2017/18, dominating B and C Grade with 592 runs from 12 innings at an average of 188.

The young batsmen will not play for Boorowa this year as he has moved back to his home town of Tamworth for work, but Coggins believes that Boorowa’s bowling strength can compensate for Paterson’s absence. 

“Probably our strength is our bowling,” Coggins said. 

“We lost our star batsmen in Jye Paterson from last year, but we’ve still got a very handy bowling attack, and over the last few years our strength has probably been our bowling.” 

It will play to Boorowa’s advantage that their two teams from last season (the Crocs and the Gators) combined to form one side in light of their move to the top grade, as it means that they now have all of their cricketing talent condensed into one team rather than split across two. 

“We thought, rather than put two sides in where we were sort of struggling to fill two sides … we’ve gone with the one side and hopefully that will be a little stronger,” Coggins said. 

“We’re expecting competitive cricket pretty much every week.” 

The other A and B Grade fixtures for this weekend include Bowning vs the Piranhas at Bowning Oval and the Pirates against Dalton at Victoria Park.