Date-stamped : 10 Jan96 - 14:37 Shell Cup 1995-96 Final Canterbury v Northern Districts Lancaster Park, Christchurch 10 January 1996. I guess I should start this by saying that Northern Districts have actually had a really good season. They won 7 out of 10 games in the round robin section, and beat Wellington for the fourth time in a row (stretching back to the finals last season) to qualify for the final. The only problem for Northern Districts was that Canterbury has been having an absolutely outstanding season. The two teams met four times in the competition and Northern Districts didn`t even get close to Cantrebury once. The short report match is as follows: Canterbury won the toss and elected to bat on the best one day batting pitch in the country. And that was it. Longer match report: One advertising campaign has been advertis- ing the Canterbury team as the "Lancaster bombers" - a label which they have largely lived to up to. They saved their best for the final however; and in front of 18,250 people, the North- ern Districts bowling got nuked. Nathan Astle is having a sublime summer with the bat. He scored a maiden one day international century for New Zealand against India (the record breaking innings of 348 at Nagpur), scored his maiden Shell Cup century (131) against Wellington, and entered the match with a 96 against the same bowling attack. Having sur- passed Bruce Edgar`s record aggregate for a Shell Cup season in the last match, he made sure that the new benchmark would be a challenging one, carrying his tally for the season past 600 runs. In the end he scored 129 from 126 balls, including three sixes - a useful warmup for his likely test debut against Zimbabwe on Sa- turday. His partner for much of the innings was the left handed Stephen Fleming. In my opinion, if you want to score a century, there are very few better batters to have at the other end. He has the ability to continually turn over the strike with single after single, and yet hit the 2s, 3s and 4s to keep the scoring rate ticking along at a run a ball. Unlike previous occasions, he didn`t give his wicket away after getting a start this time, and his century took less time than Nathan Astles. There was only one period when he looked anything but sublime - a two or three over spell late in the innings, when he was trying accelerate the scoring by slogging boundaries. But he then returned to his "na- tural" game, and the Northern bowlers started getting hammered again. He was dismissed for 102. The Canterbury total finished on 329/5, a record for the Shell Cup competition. Strange piece of trivia - Canterbury have now scored an innings of over 300 runs in each of the last 3 seasons; beyond that there have been only two other instances of 300+ to- tals in Shell Cup history. The Northern bowlers got pasted. They were thrown off their game and bowled pretty badly as a result. Roydon Hayes suffered the indignity of seeing 21 runs come off 1 over from the bat of Nathan Astle (2x4 2x6 1x1), and most of the bowlers were reduced to cannon fodder. The Northern fielding fell apart as well - a couple of dropped catches, fumbles conceding runs in the out- field, overthrows from overzealous hurls at the stumps. All told a match they would rather forget. To their credit they came out swinging in their turn at bat. Michael Parlane hit a blistering 31, Adam Parore a rapid 51. Roydon Hayes hit a couple of sixes when the last rights were be- ing administered. New test bowler Geoff Allot was particulalrly savaged. He returned the figures of 9-0-72-3. But with Owens taking wickets in consecutive balls and the other bowlers chip- ping in, the total was always too much for Northern. Canterbury has now won the Shell Cup competition 4 times in the last 5 years. This year they lifted their game again, and played at another level from every other team in the competition. They went through 12 games unbeaten and only in couple of games (the two against Auckland spring to mind) were they ever under any real pressure. Contributed by Chris Owen (chris@iceberg.southern.co.nz)