Cricket: Aussie pays tribute to team-mates after fireworks

Carlton overseas amateur Blake Dean lit up their routine victory over McCrea FS West in the SNCL Premier Division with a quickfire 50 and then thanked the batsmen above him in the order for making his job easy.

The Australian youngster smashed 55 not out off just 25 balls after coming in to bat in the 43rd over to delight the crowd at Grange Loan and put the game out of the beleaguered visitors' reach.

Those runs, including eight fours and two sixes and taking just 28 minutes, helped Carlton post 321-6 from their 50 overs batting first. The visitors were then bowled out for 140 as Carlton won convincingly by 181 runs.

Earlier, Fraser Watts, Preston Mommsen and Cedric English had all posted half centuries for the Edinburgh side and Dean said: "When the top order batsmen are going so well as they have been for us this season it really makes it easy for the guys like me in the middle order to go in and score runs.

"Fraser and Preston always seem to get us off to a flying start at the top of the order and it gives us all confidence when you are almost always guaranteed to be building on a solid foundation.

"When I went in I was looking to rotate the strike, but their bowlers began bowling some loose balls and I just tried to take advantage of it.

"It was an all-round good team performance, but we know we will have tougher tests to come in the last few weeks of the campaign."

Mommsen set the tone for the afternoon when he hit 56 off 59 balls against the second bottom side, who were missing key men Dougie Lockhart and Gordon Goudie due to a holiday and a wedding respectively.

He especially took a liking to the bowling of Aftab Talpur who went for 52 off just six overs. And once Mommsen was out to the bowling of spinner Muhammad Kashif, his opening partner Watts, who top scored with 77, took up the lead role and he and English put on 131 for the second wicket.

When English fell for 58 in the 40th over, again to Kasif who was the pick of the visiting bowlers with his colleagues toiling, Carlton were well set and a further 121 runs were to come in the next ten and a bit overs.

Jamie Kerr fell in the 42nd over and then Stevie Gilmour in the 43rd, but then the Blake Dean show began.

He hit his second ball for four and then began smashing every delivery with the two sixes off Kashif in the 48th over clearing the hedge to much cheering from his team-mates.

It was an innings reminiscent of Stuart Davidson's 66 from 39 balls for Grange against Carlton earlier this month and both will be remembered by Capital cricket fans for a long time to come.

McCrea FS West never looked likely to threaten the large total set by Carlton, but Moneeb Iqbal and captain Ian Young did start reasonably well opening the batting.

That was until Scotland all-rounder Iqbal tried to hook the first ball of Gordon Drummond's spell and got it all wrong, being caught by wicketkeeper Kerr after skying it in the air.

From then on, the ever-reliable Drummond and fellow seamer Charles Legget kept probing away at the West batsmen and Legget got reward for his fine spell with the wicket of Young.

The only worry Carlton had at this point was the weather, spinners Ross Lyons and Watts coming on in the 16th and 17th over respectively in a bid to speed things up to make sure West's innings got past the 20-over mark to constitute a game.

In the end, the rain never came and from 76-3 after 25 overs the match became more like a training session for Carlton as West had no chance of winning the match.

Despite the pedestrian nature of the last hour and a half of the encounter, skipper Watts will have been pleased with the way Lyons bowled to take 4-22, while he took two wickets with his own occasional bowling and Drummond was at his miserly best in only going for 16 in ten overs. The team's fielding was also exemplary.

What will slightly frustrate Watts, though, is that, while all the club's Scotland players have been back in the fold, they have had two regulation league victories over the bottom two in the last fortnight when he would rather have had himself and the others available for tougher tests such as this coming Saturday's trip to Dunfermline.

They will be missing, however, and it will give the club's up-and-coming young players another chance in the top team as Carlton aim to keep their title challenge going into August.