ACS Overseas First-Class Annual 2014

Matches in 2014 With the ICC Intercontinental Cup not due to resume until 2015, the 2014 season (outside England and Wales) consisted of a mixed bag of Test matches and games involving ‘A’ teams. Sri Lanka hosted two-Test rubbers against South Africa and Pakistan. In the first of these, South Africa, having comfortably won the first Test, had a desperate struggle to save a draw, with eight wickets down, in the second. South Africa’s 1-0 series victory was enough (just) to restore them to the top of the ICC rankings, from which they had been temporarily dislodged when the table was routinely refreshed at the end of the 2013/14 season. The following series, against Pakistan, was easily won 2-0 by the hosts, thus breaking Pakistan’s sequence of three successive 1-1 draws. After their Sri Lankan tour, South Africa paid a short visit to Zimbabwe for a single Test, which they won with predictable ease but without inflicting the kind of humiliating rout that Zimbabwe has sometimes suffered in the past. The remaining Tests were in West Indies. New Zealand visited for three Tests in June, a series of considerable interest because the sides have, for some years, been very closely matched in the ICC rankings. It was New Zealand that took the honours: after winning the first Test and losing the second, both by wide margins, they eventually prevailed in the third – a fine, competitive match ultimately decided by a splendid second-innings 161* by Kane Williamson. In early September, Bangladesh visited the Caribbean for two Tests, being heavily defeated in both – an outcome that emphasised the gulf between even a struggling West Indies team and the bottom side in the ICC rankings. The same point had been made a few months earlier when Bangladesh A visited Barbados for two matches against the West Indies Board’s new High Performance Centre, which aims to nurture talented young cricketers from all over the Caribbean. The youngsters got off to a great start with a huge 351-run win in their first match and just failed to follow up in the second, as the visitors’ last-wicket pair clung on desperately for a draw. Australia hosted visits to Queensland by India A and South Africa A, playing two matches each against Australia A. Bowlers struggled in all four games; the only one to reach a result was a victory for South Africa A. Afghanistan’s visit to Zimbabwe, deferred from the 2013/14 season, finally took place in July and August and involved two first-class games against Zimbabwe A: a rare opportunity for the visitors to try their mettle against a full ICC member (admittedly the ‘A’ team, but it contained several Test players). Both matches were extremely tight: Afghanistan won the first by 35 runs before going down by eight wickets in the second, a low-scoring affair completed in two days. As mentioned in the ‘Matches in 2013’ section, Ireland has inaugurated the Inter-Provincial Championship, a domestic competition that, although not first-class, is played on a two-innings basis over three days. Leinster retained the title in 2014, again ahead of Northern. (JCB) 661