Join Warwickshire club hooting with delight by winning £500 for your team

Ortus Energy Greenest Ground award opened for 2025

Tanya Aldred | 24/03/2025 at 09:00

It was a joy to be at Fillongley CC to see them collect their award as winners of the Ortus Energy Greenest Ground award 2024, organised by The Cricketer.

The sun threw off its winter garb for the occasion and beamed down as Stephen Gardener, the club's sustainability lead, and Saad Qazi, a student from Mumbai whose work had helped form the action plan, showed us around the Warwickshire club.

We inspected the once-neglected pond – previously completely overwhelmed by holly bushes, as well as housing half a car and a discarded sofa, and which now attracts frogs and coots, and admired the community orchard of apple, pear, peach, cherry and almond trees where club members will be able to help themselves as the fruits and nuts ripen.

We saw the wildflower meadow which has brought energetic voles and with them Joe Hoot the barn owl, and how he has been joined by Ben Stoats, nicknamed after he "made a very swift end to a rabbit".

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Joanne Bowen, CEO of Pat Cummins’ Cricket for Climate, presented the award. She was in the UK to attend the first sports summit of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, launched in 2020 by King Charles to encourage the private sector that focuses on nature, climate and sustainability is not counterintuitive to economic growth.

It was great to have the opportunity to exchange notes and learn how C4C works with players to enable them to become climate ambassadors, focussing on finding the topic within the huge sustainability umbrella which interests them, be that climate tech and energy, nature and biodiversity, carbon saving or more.

And with the spring weather doing its bit to win over an adopted Queenslander, she left determined to take the Greenest Ground idea back over with her to Australia.

Fill out the form below to enter Ortus Energy Greenest Ground 2025 and you could win £500 for your club!

This article first appeared in the April 2025 issue of The Cricketer magazine. Subscribe here

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