By the Bulls’ captain Ryan Knowles’ own admission the club had an “average” first part of the season and it must turn its form around immediately if it is to stay in touch with the top four.

Brown Hill brought up its first victory of the year in the final game before Christmas with a 45-run win over East Ballarat. It will be looking to rediscover that winning former a month later as it takes on second-placed Darley.

Knowles does not expect to see any cobwebs in the side, with the majority of the team playing in the seconds last week or in the twenty20 format.

Knowles, who had a run with Leopold last week, said it was crucial to win this week’s clash. 

“We’ve had an average first half and we’re still only a game out so we need to keep winning to stay in touch, we can’t afford to drop too many more,” Knowles said.

“If we keep winning and the sides above us drop one or two, we can still stay in touch as long as we win our games when we play those sides above us.

“Darley will be a big test, they beat us reasonably easy in the two-day game, hopefully the one-day game suits us a little bit better.”

In the two sides earlier meeting in round five, the Lions piled on 291 runs in its first innings and had Brown Hill on the back foot for much of the match.

Knowles said the key to Saturday’s one-dayer would be starting well, whether it be with bat or ball.

“Last time we played them we didn’t take early wickets - they batted the day. Our batting wasn’t too bad early, but we fell in a hole being behind the run rate trying to chase 290.

“As long as we get off to a good start and a few guys in the middle-order start making some runs we should be ok.”

Knowles felt the poor start to the season was due to a lack of consistency throughout the batting order.

Brown Hill has managed to get off to some good starts, largely off the back of opener Joe Crichard (averaging 31.5 runs) and Knowles (35.5 runs) at number three, but have collapsed throughout innings’ too many times.

“Our top-orders done ok, we’ve got off to good starts, but our consistency through the rest of the batting line-up - we need to improve a little bit.

“We just need consistency through the whole lot and some runs from a few other guys rather than just leaving it up to the top couple of blokes.”