Umpire blunder irks women's rep side

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The new Wanganui senior women's cricket team had another heavy loss in their return to representative cricket after 14 years, beaten by nine wickets in New Plymouth on Sunday.

Mentor Dilan Raj was not happy his star batsman may have been fired after a parent umpire judged her out when she had once again scored over half of the team's total.

Raj said the umpire's association is supposed to appoint all officials for representative games, however, when an assigned umpire did not show up, a father of one of the Taranaki players took over the role in the Mike Shrimpton Trophy game.

Wanganui were promptly dismissed for 106, but again all-rounder Jessica Watkin stood firm by scoring 61, which included a 42-run middle order partnership with veteran Trin McCarthy, who along with Jen Bennett rejoined the team after playing in the last women's representative team in the late 1990s.

Raj said the local man gave the 15-year-old Watkin out when his own daughter was bowling and then approached the team in the lunch break to apologise because he now "wasn't sure" if she was dismissed.

The assigned official failing to turn up without notice and the lack of an available replacement should not have happened, Raj said.

"At women's representative level there's only a few girls that dominate, so when you have issues like [Watkin's dismissal], it just cuts down a team."

Nonetheless, Raj said the group of players still needed to take ownership of their training outside of game days if they wanted to play representative cricket.

Aside from Watkin, the next highest contribution was the sundries.

Taranaki comfortably picked off the total for the loss of one wicket.

Wanganui's next game will be this Sunday against Manawatu at Victoria Park, while the Taranaki and Hawke's Bay teams will also be playing each other at the ground at the same time.