Reigning Allan Border medalist Steve Smith has enjoyed a fruitful return to domestic one-day cricket, scoring a century against Victoria in the opening fixture of the Marsh Cup as the Blues cruised to an easy win.<\/p>\n
The former Australian skipper's stroke play was on full display at North Sydney Oval as he played a composed innings of 127 runs off 124 balls before being dismissed in the penultimate over of the first innings, thanks to a brilliant catch from Matthew Short<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Blues were in an early hole at 3-30, before Smith held down one end while a rotating cast contributed powerful cameos at the other.<\/p>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/cricketcomau\/status\/1361136056658063366<\/a><\/p>\n Smith's Aussie teammate Pat Cummins came agonisingly close to a personal milestone in his first game as NSW captain, being dismissed for 49.<\/p>\n Ollie Davies, 20, made the most of his List A debut, smacking 57 off just 41 balls.<\/p>\n Sean Abbott and Kurtis Patterson chipped in with quickfire scores of 31 and 23, respectively.<\/p>\n A star-studded Blues line-up were without David Warner, Josh Hazlewood or Mitchell Starc, but managed to set an imposing score of 9-318 for Victoria to chase in what will be a crucial match in the whirlwind, two-month competition.<\/p>\n Victoria stumbled early in their run chase, losing 2-20 before Marcus Harris and Peter Handscomb offered temporary resistance, but both were dismissed in quick succession with the visitors' team total still short of three digits.<\/p>\n It was left to Short to play a lone hand in an unlikely victory, but when he was given LBW off the bowling of Liam Hatcher for 67, a win was all-but-assured for New South Wales.<\/p>\n They were eventually bowled out for 259, giving the Blues a 59-run run win.<\/p>\n Every win will be vital with each state only playing each other once, with no semi-finals.<\/p>\n The top two will go straight to a final on April 11.<\/p>\n For a daily dose of the best of the breaking news and exclusive content from Wide World of Sports, subscribe to our newsletter by<\/strong><\/em> clicking here!<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reigning Allan Border medalist Steve Smith has enjoyed a fruitful return to domestic one-day cricket, scoring a century against Victoria in the opening fixture of […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34979"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34980,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34979\/revisions\/34980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}