Double century … Werribee captain-coach Travis Bean will play his 200th first XI game this Saturday. 58726 Picture: KRISTIAN SCOTT
“I played all my junior cricket at Werribee and all my senior cricket at Werribee. It’s great to be able to play them all at the one club,” Bean said.
The Bean name has a proud history at the club. The captain-coach’s father, Geoff, was the first coach of Werribee when the side joined the sub-district cricket association. A former vice-president of the club, he played 100 first XI games for Werribee.
“It’s an honour to do that (reach the 200) after he did it back in the 70s,” Travis Bean said.
He lists his highlights as winning the 1994-95 and ’95-96 premierships and, on a personal level, topping his side’s batting average in the 2001/02 season.
“The other one of course is being captain-coach this year,” he said.
“The opportunity came up at the start of the year when our previous coach moved on to district cricket and it’s something that I always thought that potentially I could do, and when the opportunity came up the club spoke to me and we worked it out.
“It’s been great, it’s hard work. Everybody at the club wants to speak to you all the time, so it’s a matter of adjusting to that and making sure that you’re always available to everybody in the club to speak to.”
Werribee is sitting 10th on the ladder, a position it finished in last year, but Bean is still hopeful of playing in finals. The Tigers are only one win behind fifth team Croydon.
“Any club is judged by how its first team goes so we obviously would like to think that our first team can make finals, and we’re still in the hunt for that,” he said.
“And our lower grades are doing really well. Our seconds and thirds are on top of the ladder.
“We’ve got some hard work to do, in the next two weeks we’ve got (top team) Melton and (second-placed) Oakleigh. But if we can put some runs on the board and enable our bowling to defend a couple of good scores I think we’ve got a good chance to be competitive.”
Werribee has perhaps let too many wickets fall cheaply, with stats showing that the side has lost the most wickets of all first XI clubs this season.
The Tigers certainly went down like nine pins in the recent Twenty20 game against Williamstown – but the shortest version of the game is something all clubs have had little time to adapt to.
“The Twenty20 experiment seemed to work OK and I think there’ll be more of those next year for premiership points so we’ll see how that turns out next season,” Bean said.
“There’s more and more limited overs coming into it, even in our league. In the end the more cricket we’re able to play the better.”
Bean said he enjoyed the “novelty” of playing one-day cricket, which is the longest form of the game players have been able to play with all two-day games being revised because of the unseasonable wet weather, but also longed to play a traditional two-dayer.
He says he’s still got plenty of cricket left in him.
“At the moment I’m injury-free, I’m going OK and I’m enjoying my cricket, and I’d like to have some dry weather but you know these things happen. I haven’t got any plans to stop playing at the moment. As long as everything goes OK I’m going to continue.”
