Cherishing the club game

PAUL EDWARDS: As someone who spends his summers travelling round England by train I’ve lost count of the grounds I’ve glimpsed for a few seconds and wondered if the cricketers who play there are having a good season or a rough one

We are more or less at the midpoint of the season. It is an effort to remember the snows of that first weekend and there is no call as yet to think of bittersweet autumnal mornings. Even in a summer swamped with sport, much of it postponed from last year, cricket clings to its share of publicity, even if only one trophy has been awarded and two competitions, plus a major Test series, have not even begun.

But the games I’d invite you to think about in this column have received next to no coverage outside league websites and local papers. Having written about some of the finest cricketers on the planet a fortnight ago and paid tribute to New Zealand, the best Test team in the world, last week, I’m now going to consider club cricket, the broad base of the game’s pyramid without which the entire shebang would come crashing down.

The encouragement to do this comes from the fact that at least some of the people reading this column will have watched, played or been otherwise involved in such games over the past weekend. The specific clubs I mention may be unfamiliar but that does not matter greatly. This column is still about you and all you do for the game. Perhaps it will also be a reminder that at least some people in my trade have not forgotten either the cricketers who play only for the boundless joy of doing so or the folk who give up their free time so that club games can take place at all.

The story of Hugo Hammond, the cricketer

None of the more detailed reports in this piece would have been possible had I been covering the County Championship. But we are nearing the end of a four-week break in that programme and for three of those weeks I have been left more or less free to catch up on other work and watch whatever local matches I fancied. So a week last Thursday I took the train to the Wirral to watch my own club, Southport and Birkdale, take on Caldy in a Vitality Club T20 game at Paton Field.

I don’t think the sides have met since 2005 in a match I scored near the end of a summer when my writing was more a matter more of hope than anything else. Like all clubs Caldy have enjoyed great days, winning the National Village Cup in 1996 and 1997, but those fine honours were equalled a few weeks ago when their first XI player, Chris Edwards, was awarded a British Empire Medal in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for his services to learning disability cricket.

^{Southport & Birkdale CC have hosted County Championship cricket in the past}

Edwards skippered the England Learning Disability side that beat Australia 5-1 in 2015 but his many achievements on the field have been matched by a determination to promote the game more widely, specifically to those who, like himself, might have thought their personal circumstances prevented them taking part.

As I watched my own club edge a fine contest by 12 runs on a lovely ground that boasts a view of North Wales across the Dee estuary I thought of how little had changed since my last visit but also whether Chris’s magnificent efforts on behalf of a sport that has been his life would have been recognised in the era when Caldy were winning cups at Lord’s. I doubted it.

Less than 48 hours later I was watching S&B again, this time in an all-day ECB Premier League game against Formby at Cricket Path. The visitors batted over 65 overs for their 178 runs – thankfully we still play declaration cricket in the Liverpool Competition – and the home side were on course for a comfortable victory until they collapsed and squeezed home by three wickets.

It was a rich afternoon, made all the more so by Isaac Lea’s brilliant pick up and throw from deep square leg that ran out Formby’s Michael Booth but also by the sight of the home side’s off-spinner, Jackson Darkes-Sutcliffe, taking five wickets. I should confess to a personal connection here.

Jackson is the son of Simon Sutcliffe, with whom I worked closely when he was captain of Southport and Birkdale in the mid-1990s. Simon, also an off-spinner and an Oxford Blue, spent two full years on Warwickshire’s staff but his career benefitted enormously from the guidance of his own father, Peter, yet another slow bowler, who was the National Cricket Association’s first director of coaching.

Peter Sutcliffe died in January and this is not the place for an obituary. Suffice it to say no man has loved cricket more than he did and few have made a greater contribution to it than he did when he designed the first coaching courses, many of them with the aim of helping primary school children learn the game.

We should be grateful that the work of people like Chris Edwards ensures that cricket is increasingly available to everyone regardless of background or family involvement. Nevertheless, as I watched a third generation of Sutcliffes bowl fine off-spin I thought how much we still owe to the encouragement of parents who note their sons and daughters’ love of the game and then do all they can to develop it.

Cricket is also very much a family thing at Ormskirk where I spent last Sunday watching the home side take on Blackpool in the regional final of the Royal London Club Championship. This is arguably the most prestigious competition in the recreational game for it allows the strongest sides in the country to play each other in 40-over knock-out matches. While I watched the match at Brook Lane powerful clubs like Sandiacre Town, Ealing, Cambridge and Bath were also winning places in the last 16 and thereby sustaining their hopes of playing in September’s final, which usually takes place at the headquarters of a first-class county.

So Ormskirk v Blackpool was a big game and it also looked like being a brief one when I arrived late and saw the visitors struggling on 26 for 6. I took my place on a bench near the sightscreen and watched Blackpool’s seventh-wicket pair put on 31 runs. “You’ve walked a partnership in,” said a chap sitting nearby, thus introducing me to a phrase I’d never heard.

He later informed me that the previous day he had seen Farsley bowled out for 85 and yet still beat Pudsey St Lawrence by 12 runs. I relished the fact that someone would watch a club game in Yorkshire on the Saturday and then travel across the Pennines the next day to see another. I wondered how many other people spend their summers watching club cricket without ever going near a first-class ground. I thought of the painting “Reminiscence”, about which I wrote a few weeks ago.

But my companion was by no means the only person who thought it worth spending their time at Brook Lane. There was a very good team sitting on the other side of the boundary rope, for among the spectators were Simon Kerrigan and Josh Bohannon, both of whom played for Ormskirk even when young professionals at Lancashire. Blackpool recovered to the extent of making 113 and their hosts lost four early wickets before Ian Robinson and John Armstrong, two former captains, took them home in some style.

^{Lancashire's Josh Bohannon was among the spectators at Ormskirk}

My brief break from the county circuit is nearly over. On Friday I shall be at Headingley for the T20 Roses match and next Monday I shall be at Cheltenham to watch Gloucestershire play Middlesex. (Readers who wonder how such activities can be described as work can be assured they are not alone.) Yet much as I love the professional domestic game I still cherish any opportunity to watch club cricket. In his poem “The Whitsun Weddings” Philip Larkin writes about a train journey from Hull to London in late May and the view from the window:

An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl –

As someone who spends his summers travelling round England by train I’ve lost count of the grounds I’ve glimpsed for a few seconds and wondered if the cricketers who play there are having a good season or a rough one; whether the club’s finances are in good order; whether the junior teams are flourishing. Such thoughts reconnect me to the game I once played. They remind me what matters.