Association to bring back five-innings format

THE Port Moresby Women’s Softball Association (PMWSA) will be bringing back the five-innings format for competition following calls from clubs to have more game-time.
PMWSA president Ian Soweni said a decision was reached after a club delegates meeting last week with the five-innings format to be introduced for round six this weekend.
Soweni said the longer innings would be the only difference for the competition with the shortened boundaries and loaded bases to remain.
“Last week we had a club delegates meeting and teams wanted to increase the number of innings to five so our challenge to clubs now is to get players fit and prepared,” he said.
“A lot of clubs say the current three innings means only a handful get some game-time and there’s plenty of players missing out so we want to see if the increased innings will make a difference to that.”
Soweni said with the increase in innings teams would need to stay competitive for a longer period and those that did not would see them lose by big margins. That is already happening with some teams getting beaten badly because of their inability to competitive in the later stages of games.
“It’s going to be a challenge and we’re going to be trying it out for round six and we might running it for the finals series once we see that teams are performing to the level that we want them to be at.”
He said teams had generally picked up on the competitiveness of games in the past month with matches ending in close margins.