Congratulations to Shayne Lin who has won the Smartline player of the month for October.

Stuart Craig from Smartline (http://www.smartline.com.au/scraig) is a personal mortgage adviser and one of our major sponsors for the 2016/17 and hopefully for many years to come, we thank you for your support. Below is a write up from the 4th Grade captain about Shayne.

While the whole team has batted and bowled well so far this season, a large portion of the success in 4th Grade this year, can definitely be attributed to the dominance of Stags veteran Shayne Lin. Although he has wicket kept for many seasons, some good batting results up the grades last year helped him to arrive at the decision to give up the gloves and focus on his batting for the 2016/17 season. Becoming an out and out batsman this season, he has arrived with a renewed focus and the results have certainly reflected that.

After being looked at more as a middle order pinch hitter previously, he has taken to opening this season, and on every occasion so far, he has left the opposition captain and opening bowlers, clueless as to how they can contain such a force. His defense of the good balls has been rock solid, but anything short, wide, or full has been sent to, and quite often, over the boundary.

To highlight the beastly nature this batsman we can look at his three knocks this season…
He started the year with a 27, of that only two of his shots weren’t boundaries, A sign of things to come.

It was his second dig against Fairfield where the fireworks really started. He was extremely aggressive from the start and got the team to 1/91 from only 12 overs (7.58 r/p/o), destroying one of their opening bowlers in particular, who was left with figures of 0/43 off his first 4 overs. He then went on to finish with 120, consisting of 14x 4’s, and 5x 6’s in just 30 overs.

Anyone who may have thought a game off for a wedding in Round 3 might have a negative impact, couldn’t have been more wrong. Yet again he came out and destroyed Bankstown the same way he left off against Fairfield. In fact, he improved on his previous score and raced to 134, hitting even bigger and increasing his 6 count to 8, along with 9x 4’s.

With consecutive centuries, this is a batsman in an absolute purple patch, who is putting together huge match winning scores at an extremely fast rate. Whichever grade ends up with his services should consider themselves very lucky indeed. Let’s hope we see more of the same in the rounds to come.