Valleys win the Barooga title - our 10th year

Moonee Valley celebrated its 10th year at the Barooga Over 35s cricket competition by winning the tournament - a feat we also achieved in 2019.
The Valley was represented by a group of past and present players and we won all three of our games - all played on excellent turf wickets for the January 8-11 tournament.
At left: Our team for the big win in Round 1: L-R. Back - Vaib Deshpande, Amit Chaudhary, Mark Gauci, Brendan Rhodes, Daniel Phillips and Dean Lawson. Front - Sean O'Kane, Allan Cumming, Peter O'Kane, Tony Gleeson and Charlie Walker.
We had a big win in our first match - the feature game under lights at the Barooga No. 1 oval on the Tuesday, compiling an imposing 3/304 from our 40 overs batting first before rolling the opposition for just 174.
Our next matches were day games at Barooga and Cobram and we also finished them strongly.

At right: Moonee Valley's Brendan "Jonty" Rhodes (left) receives the Barooga trophy and a signed bat from organiser Tony Tranter.
Another team, Castle Hill also won three games, but Moonee Valley took out the trophy due to a superior net run rate.
Our Vaib Deshpande won the batting award for the trophy, batting in all three games for 157 runs without losing his wicket.
Our squad was Mark Gauci, Allan Cumming, Daniel Phillips, Vaib Deshpande, Amit Chaudhary, Sean O'Kane, Peter O'Kane, Craig Pridham, Dean Lawson, Tony Gleeson, Brendan Rhodes, Charlie Walker and Leigh Adkins - representing six MVCC Life Members and eight Premiership players.
Mark Gauci sat out the final game of our fixture due to general soreness - the only match he has missed in our 10 years at Barooga.
As well as Vaib's award, our star performers with the bat were Amit Chaudary with 105 runs @ 105, Sean O'Kane with 70 @ 70 and Peter O'Kane with 64 @ 64.
Amit and Shaun each took 5 wickets - Amit at 7.8 and Sean at 8.4, while Dean Lawson took four catches behind the stumps in our third game.