Eagles likely to fly home

With things looking grim and the Eagles innings teetering at 8-85, Ebert showed tremendous character and determination to help the Eagles to a competitive total of 219 runs, at George Parry Oval, Mona Park, Auburn.
With conditions just prior to the start of the match being very humid, with heavy cloud cover favouring the team bowling first, the toss of the coin became very important for both teams. Mounties won the toss and elected to bowl.
The prevailing conditions were clearly favouring the Mounties bowlers, with new ball moving through the air and off the pitch.
After losing his opening batting partner in the third over for three runs, Eagles Captain Asad Usman tempered his natural aggressive style and dug in against some very accurate, tight bowling from Mounties.
When Asad went for 29 runs, Peter Andonopoulos batted with composure to put together a hard-fought score of 21. However, with his departure, wickets began to fall at a steady rate with the Eagles finding themselves in all sorts of trouble at 6 -73 and facing the prospect of being bowled out for under 100 runs.
But when Ebert was joined by experienced seam bowler Mark Bursa, they took the fight up to Mounties. Bursa struck a powerful 43 runs and in doing so, put on an extremely valuable 79-run eighth wicket partnership with Ebert, taking the score to 164.
Following the dismissal of Bursa, seam bowler Aaron Hadley, who was making his first grade debut, came to crease and undaunted by the situation, batted with a cool head to put on a 9th wicket partnership of 54 runs with Ebert.
With the end of the day’s play approaching, Ebert was caught behind for 94 runs, just missing out on what would have been a much-deserved century.
Lower Grades: Second Grade – Auburn 220 (D Gulia 45, A Diwan 41, P Randhawa 20 ) v Mounties; Third Grade – Auburn 0-18 v Mounties 170 (S Rana 5-19); Fourth Grade – Auburn 1-24 v Mounties 8-217 dec. (S Zammit 3-40, A Khan 2-33, S Tawakal 2-41); and Metropolitan Cup – Auburn 241 (M Minhalj 78, S Ranaweera 32, U Buhary 20) d Sydney Uni 7-203 (M Minhalj 2-21, A Sulaiman 3-35).