CRICKET: Goatacre close in on the title (From This Is Wiltshire)

GOATACRE are within touching distance of a remarkable third straight promotion after their Premier Two clash with Glastonbury was abandoned at the weekend.

Having been put in to bat, Glastonbury worked their way to 149-5 before the wet conditions caused the game to be abandoned.

However, results elsewhere mean that second-placed Goatacre are now 20 points clear of Keynsham, who they host on Saturday in their final game of 2012.

The match is an effective play-off to take on the likes of Bath and Bristol in Premier One in 2013, with Goatacre holding the upper hand heading into the high-stakes clash.

“If you’d offered us this position at the start of the season then we’d have snapped your hand off,” said Goatacre’s Sam Parish.

“Unless we get hammered by Keynsham then we should stay above them, and we still have a chance of finishing above Ashcott at the top, so it’s turned out quite well for us.”

At the start of the year, Parish freely admits that Goatacre’s expectations were modest having previously won promotion twice on the spin, but he insists that they fully deserve the position they now find themselves in.

“It’s been incredible for us. I still remember a few years back when we got relegated from the Glos/Wilts Division to the Wiltshire Division,” he said.

“At the start of this season we were hoping to hold our own and prove we deserved our place in the division. We are second in the table now and we feel we deserve to be where we are.”

With Keynsham set to descend on Goatacre Lane on Saturday, Parish says the host team’s players can afford to be confident of gaining the necessary points to secure promotion.

“We’ve only lost one game all season,” he said.

“A 20-point turnaround is massive and it doesn’t happen very often.”