Captain Fellows eyes victory to get Heaton back into title mix

Lawrence head to Bennett Lane with a thirty-point advantage over the fourth-placed hosts, who narrowly lost out to second-placed Woodlands in a cracker last weekend.

But Fellows and his troops are mindful that all is still to play for in what is shaping up to be a compelling end to the Division One campaign, especially if they sink Lawrence, who have lost three of their past four matches.

Ex-Yorkshire player Fellows, in impressive form for the Tewits this term, said: “There’s still a lot of cricket to be played and if we get the right result, we will stay in the mix.

“If we beat Pudsey, we are definitely still in it.

“It might take some other teams such as Woodlands to slip up, but that can easily happen in Bradford League cricket. The bottom of the league can often beat the top and you get some strange results.

“We have to believe we are still in it.

“We have played Pudsey in the league and the cup and both have been good games. Our game at their spot was similar to the Woodlands game in that we posted a really good total, but unfortunately we just couldn’t defend it.

“We have played some really good cricket, although looking back over the course of the season, we have probably lost three or four games which could have gone either way.

“Maybe we have lacked that ability with the ball to finish games off sometimes.”

Fellows was certainly left to rue fine margins last Saturday, when late hitting by Jordan Laban and Safraz Ahmed got Woodlands over the line after fine knocks from himself and Ishy Dawood had earlier helped Heaton post a strong total of 259-7.

On an ultimately unrewarding afternoon for the Tewits, who last lifted the title in 1999, he added: “We just came out on the wrong side of a really good game.

“It is one of those things; we knew they batted all the way down and that the lads coming in at six, seven and eight are more dangerous than those at three, four and five sometimes.

“We knew it would go right down to the death, but couldn’t contain them in the end, to be fair.

“There are probably not many teams who have gone to Woodlands in recent times and got a score like we did.

“There are certain areas of the game where we have been really strong and successful. But it was unfortunate we couldn’t put enough pressure on them with the ball.”