The Teuila Festival is a local celebration of culture, sports and recreation. 'English' cricket uses the opportunity to play cricket before the season and also to give the better players stiffer competition by selecting 'national' teams.

Usually we have Samoa vs. New Zealand and Australia vs. Europe. This year there were not enough Europeans so we picked the teams as New Zealand Wanderers, Australian Dingoes, Samoa Agriculture and Samoa Selection.

It was a hot and humid week with temperatures in the 31-35 range and humidity in the mid-nineties.

That did not suit of the New Zealanders and Australians who were generally 20 to 40lbs above a good playing weight and found the conditions exhausting.

It came down to a test between two young Samoan sides. The head up-cross-batting-huge swing style of the Agriculture team smashed a 155 run target in 35 overs.

The Samoa Selection XI well coached by by the resident coach, Seb Kohlhase, played very orthodox strokes with a straight and sound defence. This gave them about two runs an over chasing around 4.4 amid derogatory comment from the small crowd.

By the time 10 overs had gone for 62 runs and only two wickets it was generally conceded that Seb had produced a pretty team but they would never win anything. Agriculture's win by 71 runs was well accepted, and the different styles are still be debated.

The Teuila Festival provides a good competition for displaying the rising talent in our cricket.

With its new fields, properly uniformed teams and good organisation, SECA is now attracting more teams than we can cater for so we must go slowly with our build-up.

We have just completed our main competition in which we increased our teams from four to six. We already have another two entrants for 2002.

A full Saturday afternoon 50 overs competition was held with the two finalists bheing Wanderers vs. Don Bosco Technical College. This was a very even match wtih the old men from Wanderers chased along by the students who had very quick bowlers. In the end experience paid off Wanderers setting Don Bosco a target of 178 but the students crumbled for 111.

The competition was also marked by better facilities, better umpiring, better scoring but sorry about the batting.

The wet season is now upon us so the competition has ceased. We use Saturdays to play matches against the national squad picked for the Pacifica Cup. As well there is a short four team competition using the No. 2 wicket.

We will close for Christmas early this month and resyme after the worst of the wet season early in February.

© ICC