[4] That performance did not get him into the Test team, but when Eastern Province played a first-class match with MCC in early January, Ochse took five wickets for 31 runs as the tourists were dismissed in their first innings for just 49; they recovered to win the match by 10 wickets courtesy of an unbroken second-innings opening stand of 187.

In the 1928–29 season, Ochse played only one first-class game for Eastern Province against the perennially weak Orange Free State side; in taking four for 40 and then six for 37, he achieved both the best innings and best match figures of his cricket career.

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, reviewing the tour as a whole, said that the South Africans "laboured under a disadvantage in being without a fast bowler of real class".

The lack of control and consistency showed in the overall first-class cricket figures, where Ochse was the most expensive of the regular bowlers on the tour, taking just 52 wickets at an average of 34.51 and conceding runs at more than three an over, expensive by contemporary standards; he also failed to take more than four wickets in any single innings.

[11] The Times reported that Ochse was "very severely treated" by Maurice Leyland and Maurice Tate, both of whom scored centuries; it went on: "They drove his over-pitched balls as if he were a slow bowler, and when he dropped short their cutting was capable of beating the deep third man.