The Instonians cricket family celebrated at Shaw’s Bridge last night after captain Nikolai Smith was presented with the NCU Premier League trophy by proud club member and NCU president Brian Walsh.
Fittingly it followed a convincing victory, the 12th of their title-winning season, with Civil Service North unable to gatecrash the party as they had done 10 years ago when Instonians had to share the title with Waringstown.
This season they will have eight points to spare and even without professional Shane Dadswell for their final game, they still chased down their victory target of 226 in just 30 overs.
Jack Dickson celebrated the occasion by scoring his first senior century and Shane Getkate sealed the victory in style with an unbeaten 79 from 56 balls, with four fours and five sixes.
Getkate had actually made a match of if by dropping CSN captain Stuart Thompson on 20 and then saw the Ireland international crash seven sixes before, with his first ball in almost two months, he got his man, lbw attempting a reverse sweep.
Marc Ellison batted for 40 overs to hold up the Instonians attack led yesterday by 43-year-old Andrew White who, for the first time in his long career finished the season with more than 40 wickets. At the other end of the scale, Mo Aahil took his first senior wicket to highlight that Instonians first league title for seven years was all-round team performance.
For every success story there is a failure and yesterday Derraighy’s fate was confirmed, last year’s Section One champions relegated after defeat by Woodvale.