Bristol Bluebirds end season with 3 more trophies....
The Bristol ladies team have had a very successful year in 2010, and ended the season with a fantastic performance at the Let the Girls Play Tournament at Richings Park, London. They played in 3 tournaments this year and came home with 3 trophies (now displaying in club house), so well done to all that took part. This tournament is not seeded so all teams play against each other in a round robin stage, and a handicap system is used to even things out between the grades and make for more exciting games.
Throughout the first day we drew one game (Quackers) and won all the others thanks to steady batting and very tight fielding. This is the first time a few of the team have played single sex and we had no experience of playing together as a team, so were somewhat surprised by our success especially against the stronger teams.
Everyone put in good solid performances on both days, but the batting from Sophie and Georgie was particularly strong - every time they were up to bat they pushed runners around at least two and often three bases, and Susannah put in a good performance in her first outing at short stop. Tara only walked one batter the whole weekend, which most thought was a tactical play! All in all, everyone contributed in a very positive way.
We made it through to the final automatically as we ended the round robin stage on top, and faced probably the strongest team playing – Quackers - in the final. We decided to forgo our handicap which allowed us to start each innings with a runner on 2 base (against higher seeded teams), and played the 7 innings final as an even game. It was a really close and very competitive match, and for the first 5 innings the score was fairly even, but in the bottom of 6 when Quakers were behind they pulled it back with a great batting performance to put them 5 runs ahead. Unfortunately Bluebirds couldn’t quite pull it back and for the first time in the tournament our batting let us down.
However, it was a really good game and very positive comments were made both about our performance and our decision to play it on an even footing.
The team consisted of; Tara Dunningham (Desperados), Helen Doran (Desperados), Robyn Belt (Crushers), Caroline Meads (The Force), Sophie Ollin (Spartans 1), Susannah Reynolds (Real Flyers), Georgie Field (Desperados), Sally Field (TBolts) Deborah Kierle (Desperados) and Stella Ackrell (Oxford Oddsox)
Thanks to all the ladies, many of whom stood in short notice!
Much fun was had in the games Saturday night and we found out us Bristol Ladies are pretty good at the inflatable egg and spoon race after dizzying around the bat!
Looking forward to more in 2011…..
