Player of the Year award for Morris

By Maurice Trace

Castletown’s Gareth Morris took the top honours at the Isle of Man Cricket Association’s Annual Dinner on Friday night.

The dynamic southern star received the award as the Best Batsman and was also named Manx Independent Player of the Year.

Gareth had a marvellous season, scoring 1,058 runs at an average of 66, including four great centuries.

One of these was for the Island in their international Twenty20 game against Gibraltar when he smashed 113 off only 52 balls.

This included seven fours and an incredible twelve sixes.

An astounding innings which enabled the Island to win by nine wickets.

It was appropriate that the Guest of Honour at the dinner was Lancashire’s Steve O’Shaughnessy who hit a century against Leicestershire in only 35 minutes.

This broke the previous record for the fastest hundred made by Percy Fender in 1920.

Castletown had a good evening.

Other honours for the club included Travis Friend being named the Best All-Rounder, Wicus Wessels the Best Wicketkeeper and Seb Aycock the top Under-21 Bowler.

Akkie van der Berg of St John’s received the cup for Best Bowler and Cronkbourne’s Ryan Burns was named Best Fielder.

Cronkbourne’s youth policy is paying off as shown when the junior awards were presented.

Max Stokoe became Best Under-21 player, Matty Ansell was the top Under-15 performer and Andrew Vels took the Under-13 cup.

Bruce Wagstaff of Union Mills is Forrester One Player of the Year and the award for Forrester Two went to Abdul Khan of Valkyres.

The two Millennium Trophies were won by Colin Jones of St John’s and Gareth Rowlands from Crosby.

The evening ended when Chris Porter, ICC Regional Development Officer presented the European Under 17 Division Two Trophy to Island skipper Dan Hawke.