South Australian cricket can’t take a trick at the moment – while its state side languishes winless at the bottom of the one-day premiership table, the local feeder competition descended into farce in Sunday’s final round.

Six sides from SA, the NT and Papua New Guinea play for the West End Premier League Cup over September and October –  Eastern Edge, Northern Mavericks, Western Grit, Southern Force, NT Strike and PNG Digicel Barramundis. It’s billed as an elite competition designed to prepare players for first-class competition.

As the Premier League Cup final matches came to a close yesterday at Park 25 in the city, the Northern Mavericks were celebrating what they thought was a title win.

Organisers, however, had discovered a missing bonus point from round three that wasn’t on the premiership table at the start of the weekend’s final round.

As a result, Eastern Edge, courtesy of the extra point, claimed the Premier League Cup, despite finishing its campaign with two large losses.

They have now won back-to-back SACA Premier League Cups, collecting the second title by 0.0152 per cent after the final calculations Sunday.

The general consensus around the three grounds at the Park 25 reserve was that the Northern Mavericks had secured the Premier League title, after they had comprehensively dominated their game against Papua New Guinea, and the Western Grit has defeated the Edge by 123 runs, after declaring at 6/346.

If the Mavericks had known they were sitting on the same premiership points as the Edge, coach Russell Thompson confirmed they would have tried to  achieve an outright result instead of batting on and making a large total of  8/466.

“I have asked the competitions manager at the SACA to review the current status,” Thompson explained.

“At 11 am, (an hour into the final day’s play) when we passed PNG score, we were under the assumption that we’d won the title.

“We we informed at 3.30pm that the Eastern Edge had not been given a bonus point due to a clerical error with a round three score sheet.

“At that point we weren’t able to force an outright result.”

The SACA today confirmed the “scorer error”.

“On review of all the scorecards from the competition, the Eastern Edge were awarded a bonus point from a previous round and as a result, have won the West End Premier League Cup on percentage.,” a SACA spokesman told InDaily.

“Due to a scorer error, the bonus point was not included on the ladder until this weekend.

“SACA understands the disappointment this has caused the Northern Mavericks due to this error, and we will undertake a review of the process to ensure this is rectified moving forward.”

The state side, meanwhile, is still in Sydney with one more match to play in the Matador One Day Cup on Wednesday.

It has five losses and one no-result from six matches – the no result came after rain washed out the match between SA and Victoria, giving both sides two points.

P W L  T  BP  Points

WA     6 5  – – 1   3 25

Qld     6 4 2 – –  4 20

NSW  6 4 1 – 1  – 18

Vic   7 2 5 – –  – 7.5

Tas    5 1 3 – 1  1  7

SA    6 – 5 –  1  –  2