BOWLED OVER OUR NEW CRICKET HERO
IT WOULD not require a huge amount of space to house an AngloJewish cricket hall of fame.
But one player who would feature is 23-year-old Steven Reingold, who last week helped Glamorgan overcome favourites Durham to clinch one of the season’s domestic prizes, the Royal London One Day Cup.
The former JFS pupil stepped into the breach for the 50-over tournament when several of the Welsh county’s first-team regulars were otherwise engaged in cricket’s glitzy new competition, The Hundred.
He made a top score of 40 in the cup campaign, also chipping in with some useful wickets, including the scalp of former England Test skipper Sir Alastair Cook in the semi-final against Essex. In the final, he made 14, took a catch and snared the vital wicket of Durham’s Australian Test player Cameron Bancroft with his off-spin.
“It wasn’t my finest delivery,” he acknowledged. “But you take them as they come. A wicket is a wicket at the end of the day.”
He hails from a cricketing family who arrived in England from South Africa when he was one. His father Marc and brother Grant joined him in GB’s silver-winning cricket team in the Maccabiah Games four years ago.
The family are stalwarts of Stanmore Cricket Club, where his father has captained the first XI for many years and his mother Stephanie runs the junior section.
He has also played for one of the country’s few remaining Jewish cricket clubs, Vale, blasting an unbeaten 95 in 38 balls to help them win promotion to the top division of the Chess Valley Sunday League in 2017.
Being summoned for Glamorgan’s cup campaign came “completely” as a surprise, he said. When he received the call from his friend Kiran Carlson, the cup team’s skipper, “I was buzzing, I was excited, I was shaking”.
Reingold made his debut for the county’s second XI in 2019 while an undergraduate in Cardiff, home to one of the UK’s six campus centres of cricketing excellence.
Earlier this season, he impressed in a combined local universities team against the Glamorgan first XI, scoring 68 and taking four for 37. Then in a warm-up match for the cup last month, he helped Wales National County defeat a Glamorgan side with a score of 44.
The following day, he was named in Glamorgan’s Royal London 14-man squad.
According to Daniel Lightman, QC, an avid follower of the game and co-author of Cricket Grounds from the Air, only a handful of home-grown British Jews have played top-grade county cricket. The bestknown, Mike Barnard, played for Hampshire in the 1950s and Sixties. British Jews more recently involved in cricket have tended to make their mark off the field, like the Sky statistician Benedict Bermange and the denizen of BBC’s “stat cave”, Andy Zaltzman. Vale chairman Alex Haffner was “immensely proud of Steven’s recent achievements as a Jewish firstclass cricketer and the fact that we helped play a part in his development through his and his family’s long-standing association with London Maccabi Vale. “Getting to where he has takes a lot of hard work and persistence and we very much hope he can kick on to have a successful first-class cricketing career.” Rather than return to London to play for Stanmore, Reingold chose to play his club cricket this summer in Wales with Neath “so I could be with Glamorgan a little bit more”.
The one-day competition offered the experience of “the best cricket you can play in the country in that format. It’s really good to be under the pump and put myself in that challenge. You have to go up a notch or two because everyone else is that much better.” Being the underdog in the final “makes you want to play better. It’s quite tough to do it in the final but we did. And all the boys were incredible on the day.” While Durham drafted in a couple of returnees from The Hundred to bolster their side, Glamorgan stuck by the youthful team that had got them to the showpiece.
The 7,000-plus spectators at Trent Bridge were “the most people I’ve ever played in front of. I loved every minute.”
When the season is over, he will focus on finishing his MA in sports psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University. He intends to go on to train as a sports psychologist — “something to fall back on if the cricket doesn’t work out”.
But he’ll be looking to take his game a step further by training with Glamorgan this winter.
Reflecting on his record this summer, he said: “I’ve been consistent but I haven’t gone on to make a big score”.
A few hours after speaking to the JC, he just missed out on a century, making 95 for Glamorgan Seconds against Gloucestershire.