Head of Talent Development, Richard Almond provides an update on the Talent Pathway sides during the first two months of the season:
May and June have been busy months for the Boys’ age group teams with the start of our competitive match play programme.
All the age groups along the Talent Pathway have started well, and all have had good wins against strong opposition. There have also been some very good individual performances along the way.
The standout team so far has been the Wales U18 team who have progressed through their ECB T20 Cup group stage unbeaten with five wins from five matches.
Beating Somerset, Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, Worcestershire, and Warwickshire in the group stages has been an outstanding effort by the team and they now progress to their finals day which will take place in September.
They have also defeated Wiltshire in the ECB 50 over Cup knock-out cup and advance to play Devon in the next round of that competition.
The U13 team have played their first Welsh games and put up a brave fight in defeats to Gloucestershire and Worcestershire but did manage to defeat Staffordshire to get their campaign up and running. In the return fixture with Worcestershire, the boys turned around the result from the first game and chased an impressive 233 in 40 overs to win by four wickets.
The U15/16 group have been the busiest of all the teams, playing 11 games and winning six and losing five so far. The six wins came against Gloucestershire, Cornwall (home and away), Devon, Oxfordshire and Middlesex.
The U14 side has again been hampered by rain, with early games against Devon and Lancashire abandoned. However, since then they have gone on an impressive winning run in the ECB competition, beating Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire, Cornwall and Devon and remain unbeaten so far in their group stages.
The Academy entered the Club T20 Knock Out Cup this year and started with a win at Chepstow where we successfully defended 148/5 by bowling Chepstow out for 81 with the wickets shared between Davies (four), Kellaway (three) and Bailey (three).
We are going to run a Wales Age Group Honours Board for the season to highlight some of the outstanding individual performances as they come in.
Qualification for the board will be either a century or a five-wicket haul for Wales. We have four names to go on to the board this month with three players scoring centuries and our first five-wicket haul of the summer.
To go along with the five-fer, there have been a few four-wicket hauls from Cian Davies, Zac Williams, Rhys Pollitt, Aaron Bird and Ollie Rayner to name a few. To follow results on the Glamorgan Talent Pathway, please visit: https://wales.play-cricket.com/Matches
