Email This Article To Someone!

A squad of 16 young cricketers representing Cyprus had a very successful tour to the Netherlands in July.

On 2nd July they played against a very strong Under 15 Holland B Team whose opening batsman Tobias Visee is a regular first team player. He got his team off to great start hitting 74 runs before being caught by Papaonisiforou. Holland went on to score 273 for 9 wickets in their 40 overs. The most effective bowler for Cyprus was Paphos schoolboy George Papaonisforou who took 3 wickets for 46 runs in his 7 overs. With victory an almost impossible task Team Coach Colin Relton advised cautious batting with the aim being to bat out their 40 overs and make the Dutch team at least work hard for their expected win. The Cyprus batsmen followed their Coaches’ orders and batted bravely against some tight bowling. Batting for 2_ hours and staying there for 38 of their 40 overs Cyprus were bowled out for 108 runs. Although helped by 44 extras, this was a good performance against a team representing one of Europe’s top four cricketing nations.

The following day the opposition was the Holland Under 13 Team. This time Cyprus batted first scoring 138 runs from their allotted 35 overs. Opening the batting Kabir Malhotra, the Cyprus Captain, scored an excellent 56 runs. Holland replied by passing their target of 138 runs after only 22 overs to win by 7 wickets.

After watching Holland play Sri Lanka in a ODI, it was on to Antwerp to face a Belgium youth team. Knowing the strength of the Cyprus team, Belgium rested some of their strongest players to give some of their younger players the opportunity to play International Cricket. Tight bowling from Cyprus meant that the scoring rate was low. Belgium batted out their 40 overs for only 121 runs with their top scorer Shukla (20 runs) assisted by Weighill (10 runs) and Court (10 runs). George Papaonisiforou again performed well to take 3 wickets for 12 runs in his 8 overs. Next best was Liam Fletcher with 2 wickets for 13 runs from 7 overs.

Chasing an achievable 121 Cyprus also found the runs slow to score. Losing the wickets of Hill and Bailey cheaply, a partnership with opening batsman Malhotra and no. 4 bat Fletcher took the score to 53 for 3 wickets when Malhotra was caught for 29 to again top score for Cyprus. With 25 overs still left Cyprus could afford to score slowly so long as they didn’t lose their remaining batsmen. Fletcher batted for over an hour for his 13 runs before being bowled by Shukla. After the 34th over Cyprus were still on only 117 runs and they were down to their lasting batting pair of Stainton and Goyal. In the 35th over Goyal kept his nerve to hit the winning run to score 4 not out to record Cyprus Cricket’s first ever International win !

The boys returned to Cyprus hoping that the experience gained will help them succeed next year when they compete in the European Under 15 Division 2 Tournament in August 2007.