The terms “Irrewarra” and “push over” have never gone together.
But that’s exactly what district cricket’s Division One powerhouse was reduced to on Saturday after its batting misery reached alarming heights against Warrion.
Never in recent memory has Irrewarra been as humbled in a blockbuster clash, lasting just 23 overs to be all out for 69 in ideal batting conditions at Warrion Recreation Reserve.
Irrewarra captain Kane Quickensted called his team’s performance “embarrassing” and the club’s “worst for a long time” as Warrion, 5-169 of its 40 overs, brushed aside its nearest rivals in an anticlimactic top-of-the-table one-dayer.
But the whopping nine-wicket win said more about Irrewarra’s fading air of invincibility than Warrion’s rise to outright premiership favouritism. 
Cricket followers have known for weeks that Warrion was a legitimate force but few realised just how much Irrewarra was struggling without part-time stars such as Micah Buchanan, Jake Carmody and Alex Adams.   
It became clear on Saturday, as Irrewarra slipped to fourth and lost two games in a row for the first time in seasons.    
Irrewarra was also missing opening batsman Jack Cole and veteran spinner Jeff Cole at the weekend but, in the past, has been able to scrape over the line missing a number of its recognised stars.
On Saturday, they weren’t even competitive, prompting Quickensted and the rest of Irrewarra’s hierarchy to take a serious look at the club’s mid-week and game-day preparation.
Irrewarra travelled to Barwon Heads yesterday to represent Colac district in the state-wide Kookaburra Cup Twenty20 competition.
But Quickensted said his team might as well have been playing Twenty20 on Saturday, judging by the way the batsmen applied themselves. 
“Things really aren’t going too well at the moment,” Quickensted said.
“Everyone seems to be a bit blasé about it and just assuming that someone else will do the work and rescue us,” he said.
“But we’re not being rescued at the moment.”
The run out of Irrewarra star Jesse Gurrie typified Irrewarra’s day.
On 12 and starting to find his timing, Gurrie clipped a ball to Warrion’s Lachy Inglis at mid-wicket, who in one motion, trapped the ball and knocked down the stumps at the batsman’s end to find a wandering Gurrie short of the crease.      
Irrewarra’s usually-powerful batting line-up had already produced batting disasters against City United, 94 in round two, and Apollo Bay, 101 round four, before Saturday.  
Quickensted said the club would even look at introducing another training session mid-week in a bid to arrest its form slump before it was too late.
“It’s going to have to change pretty quickly because if we have a couple of more losses it’s going to leave us in a pretty bad position,” he said.
Quickensted also said Irrewarra could not rely on players like Buchanan and Adams to come back into the line-up after Christmas and solve its batting problems.
“We need to get out of that mindset that we’ve got guys coming back because there was a lot of talent in that batting line-up on Saturday,” he said.
“We just didn’t perform.”
There are no such problems at Warrion though, as the ladder-leader surged to its fourth victory of the season on the back of standout performances from new-ball spearhead Jarrod Stinchcombe and medium pacer Ryan Lang as well as top-order batsmen Pat Morrissy, Lachy Inglis and skipper Ray Barrow.
Stinchcombe, 3-13, and Ryan Lang, 4-31, ran through Irrewarra’s top order while Morrissy, 49, and Inglis, 48, wiped off the total on their own with a 75-run stand before Barrow, 46 not out, cashed in at the end of the innings.