Well here we are, cricketless Saturday’s but the countdown begins as there’s just 28 more Saturdays to endure before we’re back in action! The season may be over, and whilst I committed to myself I’d take a couple weeks ‘off’ I think I lasted until about 10.30am on the Sunday after the last game of the season before I was exchanging messages with Tom Marsland about some plans for the 2019 season!

It'd be remiss of me not to touch on what has been one of the most successful and enjoyable seasons across the whole club for many a year. Obviously there is disappointment that the 1st XI couldn’t quite secure promotion, but what a fantastic last day of the season with over 100 people in watch the closing game and then the 2’s returning victorious from Oxton to celebrate their promotion. Across all of our senior sides, we can look back with pride as to what we’ve achieved and the sheer fact that we have used 99 players this year is testament to the growth within the club. Add to that the fact that 73% of those players have progressed through our junior set up shows our commitment to developing our own talent which I firmly believe sets us up well for the future, as has been proved over many years now.

So what have I been doing since the season concluded a couple of weeks ago? Well, I’ve managed three rounds of golf with varying degrees of accomplishment and I’ve had the pleasure of attending the Junior Presentation Evening and the Cheshire Ladies Cricket League dinner on successive nights this weekend just passed. I won’t bore you with the details of my mixed golfing fortunes but touching briefly on the two presentation evenings, firstly our own junior evening was a brilliant success and really well run by Matt Owen (who even kept to his timings!!). I had the pleasure of being able to welcome each of the groups of parents in for each of the three separate sessions there with and I apologise for those parents who had the misfortune to hear be ramble on for more than one of those sessions. It was brilliant to be able to reflect across all the age groups the successes of the year, but most importantly recognise how strong we are in our junior set up. On Saturday night I went along to the Ladies league dinner where I took great pride in seeing our table fill up with no less than six trophies with the Scudder twins sweeping the board in the respective batting, bowling and fielding awards. It seemed like there were really about four clubs who seemed to pick up the bulk of the awards, us being one of them and clearly represents not only what a fabulous first season it’s been but what an exciting future lies ahead for our Ladies section. A great deal of credit for what I’ve just wrote about goes to Matt Owen who has rightly been recognised for a trio of awards (full details can be found HERE). As a club we are extremely lucky to have Matt working so hard to pull all this together, but he’s just one of many volunteers who dedicate so much time to driving us forward, all of whom I am extremely thankful for.

Looking ahead to the upcoming month, it doesn’t get any quieter which is brilliant as it keeps the buzz going as I battle through the winter! This Friday is the County League dinner which myself, Tom and a few other will be attending and then the following week we have the Wirral Sports Forum awards evening. Whilst in itself it’s great to just be nominated in the Sports Club of The Year category, I won’t lie by saying there’s not a desire to be awarded the award. Either way it’s great to be nominated alongside Matt Owen who’s up for the Coach of the year award and a host of our girls who have represented Upton Hall School and are nominated for the School Sports Team of the year award.

Next on my ‘to do’ list is to collate all the responses to the members survey we’ve had running throughout September. I must admit that when I was writing the survey whilst lying on a sun lounger in Tunisia, my expectations were we’d get about a dozen or so responses so when I saw this morning that’d we’d closed on 74 responses I was blown away. Just skim reading the responses, I can see already some brilliant feedback and my intention is we provide a response to each one of the comments you have made as I set out with the intention this was about listening to what our members have to say, and it’s important we follow up on the feedback. Some of this we will be able to action, some we won’t but what I will guarantee you is that you’ll receive a full explanation of what we can and can’t commit to an reasons why.

Right, time for me to stop now, but before I go just a reminder that the club is open every Sunday from 4pm with Paul Radcliffe very kindly runs the bar. Don’t be a stranger until April, pop along, enjoy a drink and catch up with fellow members.

Cheers
Jez Lamb
Chairman