102 off 39 balls. Davey Warner, eat your heart out and Aussie selectors, here’s one more wacker (not WACA) to add to your long list.
I went to the Perth Scorchers/Sydney Thunder game at the WACA earlier this month and a Scorchers’ player I would describe as ‘burly’ took a sensational catch down at third man.
There’s obviously been a few Maccas under the belt since his halcyon days. Wait – these are his halcyon days!
Big Bash is so ‘sensational catch-conscious’, the call of “Simmo, you little beauty” by ground announcer Mark Readings didn’t mean anything.
“Simmo? Who’s Simmo?” Asked my son Nicholas. I had to confess I’d not heard of him much.
Oh sure, I’d seen some reference to him in the press as being a hitter and that he was smashing the bowling in Perth District Cricket for Rockingham/Mandurah or someone, but stories like that are a dime a dozen.
So when Simmo played all over one and got poled for about nine (as I recall) in the Thunder game, the mind computer erased his name.
But Simmo wasn’t finished with Big Bash just yet.
He knew he could play. He told Justin Langer exactly that.
It’s kind of ‘Field of Dreams’ stuff when a guy like Simmo goes and makes his name in the Big Bash.
You can count the number of players who have scored hundreds in Big Bash on one hand. But Simmo has form.
Okay, 15.6 ain’t the greatest first class average in Shield Cricket, but 29 in T20 cricket isn’t too shaky at all.
And if you go back to 2002, Craig was a World Cup winner, albeit in the U19 tournament in Auckland, and then went on a Australian youth development team tour to India.
So Andrew Hilditch, Allan Border, John Buchanan and others must have thought pretty highly of him.
Simmo has gone back home to Paddington in Sydney and then come back to Perth several times in his cricketing career. He’s played for the NSW Blues. He’s played for WA and the Scorchers.
But until Thursday night he had not scored a ton of any kind in top flight Cricket.
Maybe the fall and rise of Craig Joseph Simmons is only just gaining momentum as he heads into his 32nd year.
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