Chris relishing captaincy chance
SOMETIMES the best answers are the shortest. I ask Chris Cunningham whether he is looking forward to being named first-team captain at Southport and Birkdale. The reply comes back like a Jos Buttler straight-drive: “100%.”
Outside it is hosing down. It is, perhaps, the first absolutely noncricket day of autumn. Cunningham will not lead S&B out for over five months and there is uncertainty about what will happen next month, let alone next season, but the former Bootle off-spinner has already begun to make plans.
Although he was not officially confirmed as first-team skipper until the club’s AGM last Monday he had already thought about one or two possible recruitment targets. He is warming to a job that until quite recently he had no idea he might take on.
“I never considered the captaincy when I arrived at S&B but then Chris Firth and Adam Phillips wanted me to have an influence on the dressing room, the personnel, the club,” he said.
“And once you start thinking like that, you get a taste for it. So the captaincy was something I’ve been pondering over the last 18 months and I hope this is the right time to take the job and do what’s needed.”
The first thing that is required, one might conclude from Cunningham’s comments, is that S&B should start playing a brand of cricket that matches the facilities at Trafalgar Road.
That will only be achieved if steel is added to style and if the first-team squad understand that standards are there to be met throughout the summer rather than just in the first few weeks of the season, when everyone’s keen.
“I want us to become more professional while remaining an amateur club,” said Cunningham. “Yes, we want to have fun and enjoy our cricket but there is that stigma attached to becoming more professional. It suggests you’re going to become more boring, but being professional was all I knew at Bootle.
“It involved turning up on time, being prepared and applying yourself. Then you enjoy your drinks at the end of the game because winning drinks are always the best drinks.
“Trying to establish that habit based on the simple idea that a winning drink is always better than just any drink is something S&B are gradually getting a taste for, especially so after being First Division champions in 2018.
“Players were coming off and getting individual plaudits and that’s something I’ve never been shy of. There are few better feelings than to walk off the ground having taken the wickets or scored the runs that have won the game.”
“The people who are applauding you don’t have to be there. They’ve taken time out of their day to support the team and they are now taking joy from your achievement.”
Cunningham knows what such moments are like. He was man of the match when Bootle won the 2015 Lancashire Cup, a fact of which he reminds you with a lot of pride but not a trace of arrogance.
“Those games and those memories set the standard,” he says.
Now it will be a case of seeing whether a few of the best practices he encountered at Wadham Road can flourish at S&B.
Inevitably high standards will be demanded. When Cunningham made his Premier League debut in 2006 he did so in a side than included two Cockbains, Graham Lloyd, Adam Warren, Ronnie Davis and John Hitchmough. That’s three first-class cricketers plus three others who would have got into most other club sides in the country.
Things are different at Trafalgar Road. S&B does not have anything like Bootle’s player budget and probably would not want things any different. The club has always laid a stress on bringing on its own players and Cunningham knows that the next few years will be about Jack Carney, Isaac Lea and others. Recruitment will be crafted around the implementation of such a strategy. The new skipper is aware of that, too, and he is also very clear where his loyalty now lies.
“I see S&B as my club,” he said. “That’s a big statement to make after spending 20 years at Bootle but I’ve developed a great affection for the place and the people here. There were initial frustrations in that when I first arrived people were simply happy just to play cricket.
“But if you consider all the facilities we have, this club should be one of the best in the competition and one of the best in the North West.”