Scotland international Jack Jarvis is spending the winter in Brisbane, Australia, continuing his cricket development with Redlands Tigers.
The 20-year-old all-rounder will be detailing his experiences down under throughout the winter on cricketscotland.com:
This Saturday was week two of our game against Wynnum-Manly, which we won, which was good.
I contributed absolutely nothing because we were batting and chased their total down before I needed to bat, so it was a day just chilling.
The week before we bowled all day and it was about 40 degress, which was the hottest I’ve played cricket in, it was ridiculous.
I bowled 13 overs or so in that heat, so it was a long day, luckily enough we’ve got a really good spinner so he was able to bowl for long spells from one end, and then all the seamers could rotate at the other end and bowl short, sharp spells.
Thankfully I did up a wicket, it was one of those days where the ball wasn’t quite going to hand, and I had a couple of LBW shouts turned down, so I felt like I bowled well.
The game before this one was completely rained off, so it was the first one where we had our Big Bash players back available, James Bazley and Sam Heazlett, and Sam scored 150 not out, so it was good to have them back!
Over the next two weekends we’re playing against Valley, who have had a Scottish connection in the past. Finlay McCreath was there last year, and Forfarshire have had a few lads go there; Jacques O’Neill, who’s been the overseas at Forfarshire the last couple of years, plays there.
Finn’s been trying to wind me up this week, but hopefully we can beat Valleys and that will quieten him down!
I had the opportunity to bowl in the nets against the West Indies before they played at the GABBA, although I can’t take any credit for their win!
It was interesting to bowl with a pink ball, and it was good to have a bowl against some high-quality players.
I was able to speak to some of their bowlers, and Shaun Tait who was their bowling coach, obviously he was focusing on their bowlers, but it was good to be able to chat with someone like him, and things like that can only help me improve.
We had a bowling coaching clinic down at Redlands with some of the youngsters which I was involved in which was good fun, some of the coaching methods in Australia seem slightly different to back home, so it was interesting seeing that and being able to get involved.
It was great to see our Under 19s finish their tournament with the win against Namibia, I was really impressed and thought they did really well. They played pretty fearlessly which was good, some of the guys over here were quite impressed as well, which takes something for them to say that!
It will be interesting to see where the guys go from here, the World Cup is a great experience, getting to play against the best players at your age. If they keep working hard, then hopefully we’ll see them continue on the right track, because I’ve seen how quickly things can change – it was about a year on from the Under 19s World Cup when I made my debut for Scotland!
I’m really looking forward to getting back involved with Scotland in the UAE next month, and it’s a really exciting opportunity to hopefully make my T20I debut, so that would be pretty cool.
I love playing with this group and pulling on the Scotland shirt, so I can’t wait to get out there with them in the UAE.
It’s going to be really nice to have Charlie Tear back around the squad as well, I got on really well with him in the Under 19s World Cup in 2022, so it’ll be great to see him again because I’ve not really seen much of him since then.
It’s always nice to have another youngster in the ranks, and he’s a gun player as well, which always helps!
