After the previous weekend’s narrow defeat against Edinburgh South, Selkirk’s players bounced back with a convincing victory over Tranent & Preston Village 2 in Saturday’s East League Division 3 match at Philiphaugh.
The visitors elected to field after winning the toss, and it looked to be the right decision when openers Greg Fenton (16) and Michael Fenton (7) both lost their wickets with the score on 32.
Todd Dekker made a quickfire 16 in a promising partnership with Rory Banks, who was dropped twice early in his innings. The all-rounder capitalised on these let-offs with a solid knock of 33 – the highest total of any batter on the day.
Rory Banks emerged as the match’s highest scorer with a knock of 33.
However, Selkirk wickets continued to tumble after his departure, and at 91-7 things looked decidedly shaky for the home team.
However, the truth of ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’ was underlined by a wonderful display of patient batting by the evergreen John Henderson.
Putting all of his experience to good use, the 59-year-old frustrated Tranent’s bowlers with a chanceless knock of 21 compiled over 80 balls faced. It boosted Selkirk’s total to 126 all out in 39.5 overs.
The visitors’ three best bowlers were Patel (3-21), Singh (3-25) and Kamal (2-19).
Any hopes Tranent had of its top order batters building a winning foundation were blown out of the water by a devastating opening spell from Greg Fenton (3-8) and skipper Daniel Heard (3-19), who reduced the visitors to 28-6.
Daniel Heard led by example to return figures of 3-19 from his eight overs.
Despite a show of resistance from Valappil (14) and Dhaliwal (12), there was no way back when Selkirk’s talented teenager, Gregor Borthwick, took a brilliant catch at deep square leg to dismiss Valappil just as he was beginning to hit out.
It was left to Michael Fenton (2-12) and Blaine Gillie (2-1) to mop up the tail-enders, and Tranent were eventually all out for 61 in the 28th over.
The win moves Selkirk up to fourth place in the Division 3 table, with Boroughmuir the next visitors to Philiphaugh this Saturday, May 10.
Saturday’s match ball was kindly sponsored by Gordon Douglas, whose father Ronnie made the handover to Selkirk skipper Daniel Heard.