THE FINALS - 3rd Grade v The Armidale School, 27th/28th March 1982
Armidale Waratahs (The Tahs) | April 06, 2026
The Waratahs Vets, a collection of star past players who had decided to play into the golden light of the long Armidale summer days, had won the A-Res Grade Premiership the previous season, then found themselves in a lower grade the next year. Go figure.
With their legendary cast, it was little wonder six of them scored more than 200 runs, all at good averages, still with further evergreens as Ian Campbell (#212) and Bob Barwick (#234) making the occasional useful contribution below the main bunch. The issue with the team was movement, both in the field and with the ball. They rarely dropped a catch - you call that instinct - but bowling sides out depended very squarely on Brian Joice (#218) and the allrounder gun, Jack Trestrail (#303). Between them, they bowled more than 300 of Waratahs 568 overs. Their fitness and success were both Waratahs strength and potential weakness.
Batting first, the TAS veteran teacher and mainstay of TAS cricket, Tony Horsley put the batting under pressure and had it not been for the 55 added by Trestrail and Alec Finlayson (#340), Waratahs 136 could have been significantly less.
TAS were rolled 53 runs short just after lunch on the Sunday. It was a significant lead but there was still time to play. Joice had taken the new ball and bowled 24 overs unchanged. Tressie had a pfeiffer from his 18.
The Vets expected to bat the afternoon out, closing down the game as they had done so often in their largely unbeaten two season run. In the Final of the previous season against their own Waratahs team mates, they had done just that and strolled to the Premiership.
They had underestimated how much lead the long days of a tight semi-final win against Churches seven days before had put into their legs and the effort taken to repel TAS in this game. Crucially, they had reckoned the TAS lads were whipped but there was still steel in some of their young eyes, not the least being Adrian Skeggs. “Moose” would eventually be an unrelenting force in the other TAS game, rugby, rising to the top and playing for the Wallabies.
Skeggs removed Syd Philp (#269) and Brian Connolly (#226), two of the best defensive batsmen ever to play with Waratahs, both snicking. Trestrail hung about for a while but fell to the same fate. At the other end, Alan Gray (#26-pictured) was doing what he had done when winning A grade Premierships and had become immovable. Joice came and went in his usual flurry of strokes until Pollard removed them both and suddenly, there seemed a remote danger. Alec Finlayson looked to be managing the tail with a second thirty for the game but it all ended quickly once he left and Waratahs had only used 45 overs. Skeggs took five of them.
The task should have been impossible. 219 required with a little over 30 overs likely. The competition’s best bowling pair requiring one last sensible effort to wrap up a second consecutive Premiership. Again, they didn’t figure on The Moose.
As usual, Waratahs had TAS on their knees at 2-11 with five overs gone … then the Moose cut loose! On the small TAS Backfield, there was nothing left to do but trust your eye, swing hard and hope for luck and that’s what happened. Skeggs was dropped several times on his way to fifty but after that, it was just slaughter. Joice kept getting wickets at the other end - five in all - but Skeggs just kept smashing both him and Trestrail. All eggs in the one basket, Joicey again bowled unchanged but after Skeggs and Holcombe had added 158 in just twenty overs, TAS literally cruised home. For his entire career, Brian Joice had teased the school boys, watching them depart for the boundary with a crushing regularity, without much effort, but this was payback.
In the end, it was an extraordinary performance from Adrian Skeggs, with 5-74 from twenty overs and 128 off what could only have been too few balls. Young legs and daring-do had finally exploded the Vets age-earned superiority and tellingly, to a man, they gathered around and congratulated the TAS boys for their escape from death to glory. There were many things for young men to learn on that Sunday … much more than just how to achieve the impossible.
Waratahs v THe Armidale School - 3rd Grade Final, 27th/28th March 1982
