Wanstead & Snaresbrook captain Joe Ellis-Grewal insists it’s becoming a two-horse race for the Hamro Foundation Essex League title as they chase down leaders Chelmsford.
The Herons will make the short trip away to Chingford on Saturday as they look to close the gap on their Premier Division rivals with just five games left to be played.
“Chelmsford picked up another win, but we extended our lead over third place, so it’s sort of looking like a two-horse race now,” said Ellis-Grewal.
“We’re very much focused on game by game, we’ve played great cricket in the last few weeks, bowlers and batters are both now firing.
“Chingford are a tough side, they beat us earlier in the year, and they’ve always been a bit of a bogey team for us.
“There is no way they are going to give us 20 or 25 points easily.”
Last weekend saw Wanstead draw with Belhus despite a strong performance as they won the toss and elected to bat first where they scored 253-1 thanks to Adnan Akram (23), Tom Simmons (111), and Robin Das (119).
In reply, Belhus managed to score 188-9 with Zain Shahzad (4-43) and Joe Ellis-Grewal (3-44) the stand-out performers with the ball for the Herons.
“To be honest we dominated the whole day from start to finish, we batted extremely well, it was a decent wicket and they’ve got a decent bowling attack but the way Simmo and Robin batted was just fantastic,” Ellis-Grewal added.
“For Tom to get back-to-back 100s was great to see and then obviously we declared early, we gave them seven or eight extra overs, and we also lost overs due to the rain which didn’t help our efforts.
“We gave them 60 overs to chase 250-odd, but we bowled really well on a flat wicket to create those chances, and we knew it would be tough to bowl them out as there wasn’t a lot in it for the bowlers.
“Bearing in mind they only took one wicket and we took nine just goes to show how well we bowled. We did drop a couple of catches and one of their guys did bat really well to get that not out at the end.
“I think we had one ball at the last wicket and it was obviously disappointing not to get that last one as I felt like we deserved it, but credit to them for holding out for the draw. We still picked up 15 points to keep a little bit of pressure on Chelmsford at the top.”
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