By Jonty Ralphsmith
Merinda Park captain-coach Matt Campbell has lamented his side’s inability to turn strong positions into victories.
The Cobras put 7/409 on a Jess Mathers-led Kooweerup attack, but Kooweerup chased it down with 10 overs remaining and six wickets in the shed.
It leaves the Cobras on the bottom of the table, with losses from each of their first four games.
The result comes after a seemingly well-timed chase against Cardinia in round 3 resulted in a 35-run loss thanks to a batting collapse.
“It’s our ability to execute which has let us down,” Campbell said.
“We should have been playing boring cricket and executed a fourth and fifth-stump line and bored them into submission.
“We should have forced them to hit through the offside or forced them to create but we were poor at our execution across the board.
“There are no excuses.
“If we can’t put at a bare minimum four balls on the offside and execute the plan we want to play to then you’re going to lose every game of cricket.
“We have to get out of the selfish mentality of wanting to get a wicket ourselves and look to play a team role and bowl in partnerships.
“Dictate games of cricket rather than being reactive, which is something we’ll work on this week.
“I think we’re now mature enough to have the brutal conversations we need to have.
“When you have a loss like that you need to look inside yourselves and look at what you can and can’t do – self-belief is a big thing now.
Despite bitter disappointment at the result, Campbell was in awe of Daniel McCalman’s 181 which set the big total up, revealing the extent of injury he’s batting through.
“’Danners’ will never cease to amaze,” Campbell said.
“It’s one of the better batting innings I’ve seen in my time.
“For a bloke who’s got a tear in his Achilles, he’s riddled with arthritis, he shouldn’t be doing some of the things he does.
“It is superhuman, words probably don’t do justice to the amount of strength and courage to go out there and open the batting when he shouldn’t even be walking.
“It left me speechless the way he goes about it week in week out.
“The way he was able to manipulate the field was so impressive; he let them set the field and hit a metre either side of them; he picks and chooses where he wants to hit the ball.”
Another positive of the day was the performance of club debutante Tobias Van Den Heever, an all-rounder from England who will line-up for the remainder of the 2024-25 season.
Van Den Heever arrived in Australia last week after scoring more than 1000 runs playing local cricket in England, with Campbell lauding his experience.
He has fit seamlessly into the culture of the club, scoring 61 off 55 in his first innings on Saturday in Merinda Park’s six wicket loss to the Demons.
“He was (watchful early) but as soon as he wanted to pick up the run rate, he picked up the run rate,” Campbell said.
“He’s a class above and is another one I’ll lean on throughout the year with different aspects of the game.
“He’s an x-factor bowler and he’s probably one of the best ground fielders I’ve played with and he’s got an arm like a base-baller.”
