The Teesra

Category: cricket

  • Back where it all started. And the importance of a hub for local cricket.

    Back where it all started. And the importance of a hub for local cricket.

    This week, I visited† the Ilford Cricket School, for the first time since I left school in 1980.

    Where I, and countless numbers of local school children, have been introduced to the game since the facility opened more than 70 years ago.

    The telephone number on the board by the front door has not updated since the “Big Number Change” in 2000, and some of the decor inside is possibly of the same vintage…

    Ilford Cricket School, January 2024

    But it’s an indoor facility where otherwise there was none back then.

    Where State schools and local clubs got to practice.

    It demonstrates perfectly, for me, the importance of a local hub, no matter how humble, in promoting and supporting the game.

    Would the London Borough of Redbridge be host to 7 Essex “Premier” clubs, each running three or more Saturday XIs and numerous junior sides, if the Cricket School had never found a home in Ilford?

    I rather doubt it.

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  • Time (again)

    I played my final game of the 2023 season last week.

    A disappointing exit from the National KO stages, although we did get to enjoy a rather charming (if slightly confused) away-day to Worcestershire for the Vase quarter final.

    Birlingham Cricket Club, venue for our final game of the season…shame we were sent to a different ground!

    After a Championship-winning season with the over 60s 4th team in 2021, and a barely believable glut of runs (by my standards, at least) in 2022, 2023 has been less fun.

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  • 40 years of bat

    40 years of bat

    I posted a couple of months ago about my cricketing 50th anniversary — 50 years since I first played, back in 1973. And I have just realised that I am using a bat that is modelled on one I bought 40 years ago.

    The face is just about held together with tape!
    Not that clear in the pic, but the bat is split from toe to splice!
    My original GN500

    Not quite Trigger’s broom (or Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus, for the more Classically-minded), but there is a direct lineage from my old Gray-Nicolls GN500 to the bat(s) I have used this season with the Essex Seniors over60s.

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