Four teams still have a chance to win the one remaining trophy at stake in Wairarapa senior interclub cricket for the 2010-11 season.
Tomorrow's semifinals in the Umpires Cup one-day series will see Flight Centre Lansdowne and Wairarapa College doing battle at the Queen Elizabeth Park Oval in Masterton and Greytown
playing Rathkeale College at Rathkeale Oval. And then on Sunday the winners of those games will meet in the cup final with Queen Elizabeth Park Oval again the venue there.
The one sure thing about limited-overs cricket is its uncertainty with the format ensuring upsets can, and do, often occur.
So while the odds would seem to strongly favour a Lansdowne v Greytown grand final the possibility of at least one of the college sides making it through to Sunday's big one can't be totally discounted. For Wairarapa College to upset Lansdowne the onus will be on their bowlers to come up with something special as Lansdowne have a batting order loaded with players whose attacking style of play is well suited to the one-day game. Give the likes of Henry Cameron, Jamie Holmes, Matthew Stringfellow, Robbie Speers and Alex Treseder an inch and they will take a country mile.
Rathkeale College too will be acutely aware of the need for their bowlers to limit the damage done by a Greytown batting line-up likely to include such big hitters as Seth Rance, Paul Lyttle and Steve Coleman. The two semifinals get under way at noon with the finals starting at 11am.
