Pitching in as new cricket season starts (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Pitching in as new cricket season starts

12:12pm Friday 13th April 2007

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On Friday night several hundred young men will be checking their whites, pads and bats on the eve of a new Bradford League cricket season.

Add to those the back-room staff, the groundsmen, scorers, tea-ladies and others, the umpires and the spectators and it is a safe bet that the new season will be engaging the attention of several thousand people throughout the metropolitan district.

For most of the 14 teams of Division One and the dozen that make up Division Two the new season represents the triumph of hope over experience, as it must do.

For the two newly promoted teams, Manningham Mills and Bowling Old Lane, Division One cricket offers greater challenges and opportunities to play against opponents with county cricket experience and, in some cases, Test Match experience.

Last season was particularly good for historic Manningham Mills Cricket, runners-up to Division Two champions Bowling Old Lane.

Bowling also put up a valiant performance against powerful Woodlands in the Priestley Cup Final.

Success has been hard won. Ten years ago the old pavilion was the target of an arson attack. "We've had some rough times," club chairman Michael Hope said.

He has been involved with Bowling Old Lane for 66 years, playing for the second team for 25 of those years.

He's old enough to remember when the club was regarded as the nursery for Yorkshire's county side.

"Bob Appleyard, Bill Athey, Doug Padgett, Martyn Moxon, Darren Gough, all played here."

But though the past is still alive in his heart he does not live in the past.

Hope by name, hope by nature.

He talked about the two existing youth teams and the club's ambition to create two more by next year.

"We have plenty of lads but it's a question of personnel," he said. "You need someone to supervise the lads, someone to score, someone to make cups of tea."

He is proud that on Saturday Bowling Old Lane will be playing cricket in one of England's finest leagues.

Club Secretary Geoff Hanson played for the club's first and second teams for many years (he topped the second team averages at the age of 44). His sons Nigel, who plays for Bankfoot, and Martin, who plays for Brig-house, used to be Bowling players along with their dad.

Like other dedicated volunteers devoted to the club, Geoff epitomises the spirit that has lifted Bowling from the ashes of that fire in 1997. Out on the square, which he cuts and marks, he talked about money.

"I've never played for money. When I was young money wasn't the be-all and end-all that it has become. If I was a young player I think I would still stick here," he said.

He was born in West Bowling and though he now lives in Baildon he evidently loves spending time at what second team skipper Haqueq Siddique called "the green oasis of Bowling."

From the outside, especially on the corner of neighbouring Oaks Fold, the locked and shuttered community centre-cum-pavilion, would not be out of place in 1970s Belfast or in that Hollywood movie Fort Apache: The Bronx. Visiting teams tend to find the area unsalubrious.

"We played four cup games here last season and won them all," Haq, as he is known, said. "It gives us an edge."

Everybody mentions Haq. He has been at the club for ten years. If Geoff Hanson and Michael Hope represent the heart of the historic club, Haq seems to be its soul. He gives me a guided tour of the renovated building, the community hall, tea rooms, new dressing rooms and showers, emphasising that volunteers did the bulk of the work, helped enormously by a £40,000 grant from Trident, the regeneration group, and another £20,000 in fundraising.

"This has taken us out of the doldrums," he said, as we looked round the perimeter of the ground from the square.

"Clubs come here from far and wide and some have this snobbery - look at the facilities!' Now we have what everybody else has got, it's for us to get it right. I like to come here of an evening and walk round. I used to come over the wall as a kid and get chased off by Jack (Jack Hill) and Geoff. We don't mind kids coming in providing they don't do any damage.

"We need up to £10,000 a year to run this club. Most clubs pay their players. We will be paying three and that will cost us up to £6,000. Two are young lads and the other is an overseas player (each club is allowed one).

"But we don't pay local players. Seventeen out of 22 are local players. They understand our position. You lose something, that togetherness, when money comes in. You get players going round tapping up clubs for money - big egos; a lot of them aren't good enough."

Manningham Mills' ground at Scotchman Road, Heaton, has had a lot of European and National Lottery money spent on a new building and a new scoreboard.

Like Bowling Old Lane, it has metamorphosed from a private cricket club to a community-based club. This is the future.

Manningham Mills Sports Association, as the place is called, is run by Byron Francis, a former Eccleshill schoolboy, boxer, footballer and sports coach. He used to run Trident's youth and community programme.

As he explained the multiple sports and social activities that go on throughout the week, a coaching session for youngsters was taking place out on the field.

"Manningham Mills, Bowling Old Lane, Allerton, Salem, Great Horton Church and Manningham Cricket Club have formed a pact to promote young people's cricket, coaching classes, team leadership and personal responsibility," he said, before rushing off to talk to a visiting Football Association coach.

Taj Butt, chairman of Manningham Cricket Centre and the all-Asian Sunday cricket league Quaid-e-Azam, said the money spent on the new building was making a big difference to parents and youngsters around-about.

Parents were slowly accepting the possibility of professional sport as a career rather than accountancy or being a lawyer, he said. That wasn't so when he was a football and cricket-mad youngster.

"In the 1970s Bradford League cricket was a no go area for Asians," he said. "Manningham Mills was an all-white club. In the 1980s if you were an Asian and you wanted to play cricket your only chance was the Quaid-e-Azam. There was segregation then.

"Things have changed quite dramatically; sometimes because of a change in an area. Without Asians, clubs like Manningham Mills, Bowling Old Lane and Great Horton would have folded.

"I genuinely believe that with the facilities we have in place, Asian boys will have the same chance of making progress as boys from Farsley and Pudsey.

On Saturday, Bowling Old Lane are away to East Bierley and Manningham Mills are at home to Cleckheaton. All-conquering Woodlands are away to Saltaire at Roberts Park, Shipley. The matches start at 12.30pm.

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