On the evenly-contested first day, the visitors' captain and vice-captain combination, Brindley Gilbert and Denver Carolus respectively, twice joined forces - first with the ball and then with the bat - to frustrate the home side's attempts to take complete control of proceedings.  Despite having lost an early wicket after choosing to bat first, Cape Town had nevertheless placed themselves in a dominant position within 45 minutes of the luncheon interval, through an 83-run second-wicket stand between Mark Ritchie and Marc De Beer.  With their seamers proving largely ineffective, the visitors introduced Gilbert's off spin in conjunction with Carolus's leg breaks.  By then De Beer had just fallen after reaching his second fifty of the season, opening the door for the spin pair to then bowl the next 35 overs in tandem and ultimately share the home side's last nine wickets between them in that time.

The home side's current and former captains Jonathan Holgate and Damian Thornton had stalled their progress for a while though, adding 47 together in a fifth-wicket stand that was spread evenly either side of lunch.  By then however, the visitors were rushing through their overs and making scoring difficult, thereby applying considerable indirect pressure as the overs available for batting bonus points steadily ticked away.  Holgate received enough loose deliveries to reach 47 off 64 balls, but he eventually holed out trying to address a run rate that seemed stubbornly locked at around three to the over.

Thus it was that Cape Town found themselves with only 194 on the board at the expiry of their 60 overs, obliging them to bat on in pursuit of a sufficiently large total with which they could dictate the game.  Thanks chiefly to Olsen, who hit three sixes in a 19-ball cameo, they did reach a decent if not quite dominant 229, but also lost their remaining four wickets in the process to hand Tygerberg an impressive haul of nine bowling bonus points.  Gilbert captured two more wickets within seven balls to complete his five-for, while Carolus cleaned up the last two wickets in successive overs to end with four scalps of his own.

In reply, the visitors' own innings got off to a solid if somewhat slow start.  Surviving a number of sharp chances, Patrick van Niekerk had to provide the bulk of the scoring, but nevertheless by some 15 minutes prior to the tea interval they had progressed nicely to 49 without loss before Cape Town finally got the breakthrough.  Van Niekerk kept going though, slog-sweeping his second six to reach his fifty shortly after the interval.  However, first Olsen and then Andre Olwagen chipped in with double-wicket maiden overs in quick succession, toppling Tygerberg to 102 for six and suddenly raising the possibility of Cape Town perhaps even being able to enforce the follow-on.

However, once again it was Gilbert and Carolus who teamed up to come to their side's rescue.  Largely untroubled by the bowling, they stabilised matters again over the next hour, before going over to the attack themselves in search of bonus points.  Disregarding the approaching safety of close of play, they thus blazed eight fours and a six from the last eight overs of the day's play - targeting Olsen in particular as his last two overs travelled for 24 - to end the first day with honours even.  Though Geoff Dods subsequently dismissed Gilbert in the first over of the second day's play, and Carolus gave Olwagen one of two catches to point in the space of eight deliveries soon thereafter as the visitors chased batting points in their remaining nine available overs, the momentum created by those two batsmen nevertheless carried Tygerberg to four batting points and reduced the first innings deficit to an ultimately paltry 19 runs when the declaration came.

Essentially left to make the running virtually all over again as a result, Cape Town nevertheless set about doing exactly that with aplomb in their second innings.  It was once more a second-wicket stand between Ritchie and De Beer that set the home side up for another solid total, Ritchie going on to reach 3 000 career runs for the Cape Town First XI in the process, while De Beer finished the season as the team's leading run scorer.  Again it was left to the perservering Carolus to stem the batting tide, and he duly castled them both in successive overs.  The subsequent batting proved even more fluent though, Rory O'Brien, Holgate and Francois Vermaak forming a rock-solid middle order that took the score from 92 for three to 195 for four in just 26 overs.  Again it was Tygerberg's spinners who carried the attack, and while Carolus plugged manfully away at one end for his second four-for of the match, this time it was fellow leggie van Niekerk who was given the job from the other end.  He did pick up two wickets in an over as Cape Town pushed hard for the declaration, but he paid heavily for his wickets in travelling at eight runs to the over overall.  Much of that damage was due to yet another invaluable and punishing innings at the death from Olsen - chancing his arm gratuitously with audacious strokeplay, his 31 from 16 balls was even faster than his first-innings effort, and allowed Holgate to set the final target at a mammoth 267 needed from 50 overs.

Although Cape Town's previous two matches had shown their vulnerability in the field during the fourth innings, had Tygerberg managed to chase that target down it would've been 20 runs more than the highest fourth innings score ever achieved in all 126 Two-Day matches contested by the Plumstead-based side over the past twelve seasons.  The visitors certainly batted as though they believed that they could achieve it though, maintaining a rate of four to the over from the outset.  Again it was Olwagen upfront with the new ball that first had to be conquered though, and after his second strike left the visitors at 55 for three, their challenge seemed to be fading.  Once again, however, Gilbert strode into the breach, this time finding able support from Dale Rose.  Taking the fight to Cape Town's young seamers in particular, they counter-attacked to hit twenty boundaries between them, both going to their fifties in the process of adding 95 together in barely 20 overs.

The visitors consequently stayed in touch with their target for far longer than might have been expected, but realistically it was unlikely to last and so it proved.  Rose fell to Olsen in the last over before the final hour started, and Gilbert followed in the off-spinner's next over as well.  Thereafter the rest of the batting line-up had little answer to the spiralling asking rate, and though to their credit they never stopped trying to win the game instead of taking the more conventional route of settling for a draw, batsman after batsman perished thereafter going for big hits.  Thus, apart from Rose and Gilbert's sixties, no-one reached 20, while their 95-run fourth-wicket stand represented more than half of the team's total.  Olsen duly completed the second six-for of his career to wrap up a comprehensive 77-run win with more than seven overs to spare, but unfortunately for Cape Town it proved insufficient to earn them their desired top-three finish in the 2008/09 1B season.

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