Club’s spruce up to make absent captain proud
“THE big thing now is that everyone at the club pulls together. Chris will expect that of us and it’s what we should expect of ourselves.”
David Snellgrove’s words at the end of his first press conference following his appointment as Southport and Birkdale CC’s interim first-team skipper should stay with club members throughout the summer.
Fortunately, there is little chance of them being ignored. The importance of ensuring S&B continues to prosper while Chris Cunningham, the elected skipper, continues his recovery in Royal Liverpool University Hospital is lost on no one.
To some extent, of course, the work of running the club continues every day. It is rare for a week to pass without a significant and productive meeting being held at Trafalgar Road. And it is rarer still to arrive at S&B and not find some function being held or a sport taking place.
This leads me to the pleasant conclusion that Southport and Birkdale is a more dynamic and forward-looking club than it has been at any time since I became a member in 1981.
Cricket and cricketers play their part in this wide-ranging prosperity but the days are long gone when the summer game was also the dominant sport.
Without the huge contributions of the tennis, hockey, squash and snooker players, S&B would be a very much poorer place.
Indeed, it would not be a going concern at all.
The change in the club’s name to Southport and Birkdale Sports Club some years ago was no cosmetic gimmick. It reflected the reality that S&B required all its members to work together for the common good.
That might be particularly evident three weeks on
Saturday when the cricket chairman, Jordan Bell, will be leading the first of what might turn out to be two Cricket Force days on which Trafalgar Road can be made ready for the new season.
In truth, however, Cricket Force is a misnomer. In recent years, members of S&B’s other clubs have joined together to give the old place something of a spring clean and spruce up. Club Force would be a far more accurate name.
This year, Bell’s hope is that any work not completed on March 23 can be finished off on March 30, one week before Edgworth visit for a pre-season friendly.
But however those days go, S&B’s members can be reassured that their second home is in good hands and that it is paying its bills. Believe me, it has not always been so.
The West Lancashire Cricket Society is the only cricket society in Merseyside, following the decision of the Sefton Park CC based Merseyside Society to fold last year, and one of only two in Lancashire.
Established in 1965 at Southport & Birkdale CC it attracts a wide range of cricket speakers on a monthly basis throughout each Winter.
The Society’s final event this Winter is the Annual Dinner on Friday 22nd March, when former Warwickshire & England opening bat Dennis Amiss is the guest speaker.
Dennis Leslie Amiss scored 43,423 first class runs at an average of 42.86, won 50 test caps & is one of only 25 men in the history of the game to have scored 100 hundreds, so he’ll have a few stories to tell.
The dinner is open to everyone on payment of £40, which includes a three-course meal and tickets can be obtained by contacting Ross Duggan on 07850 117560 or by e-mail dugganlancashire@ gmail.com before Friday 8th March.*
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