Why Yorkshire Vikings cricketer and Barnsley fan Martin Wilson is determined to give blind young people a sporting chance

“I’m very forthright with my opinions on visually-impaired children because they should be given the opportunity to achieve things,” explains Martin Wilson.  “Just because your sight is going, you can still have a life.”

Wilson, who has lost 95 per cent of his sight as a result of Stargardt disease, lives by the attitude he espouses. He was recently named as volunteer coach of the year by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) for his work for his work helping visually-impaired children play the sport, while the sports-mad Barnsley FC fan is also a qualified horticulturist.

Father-of-six Wilson, aged 57 and from Athersley, has been playing for Yorkshire Vikings Visually Impaired Cricket Club since 2014 and in 2016, qualified as a coach. Since then, Wilson has taken on responsibility for coaching Yorkshire’s new and developing players, as well as going into schools across the region.

In addition to coaching visually-impaired children, he has also given some of their fully-sighted classmates the chance to play visually-impaired cricket with simulation glasses to give them a better understanding of the challenges their peers face.

As if this wasn’t enough, Wilson has also been involved with coaching the British Women’s VI cricket team and joined their tour to Barbados a couple of years ago when they took on a West Indies XI.

His passion comes in part from the challenges he faced in his own childhood after his sight problems became apparent when he was around eight years old.

“They thought I had learning difficulties,” says Wilson. “I could still see quite well but not enough to see the board and the texts.

“I was just doing normal things that other kids were doing. But when I was learning to read, you think why are the other kids doing it more easily?”

He was sent to a blind school in Harrogate when he was 10 and found it a traumatic experience.

“I left school in the summer as a normal ten-year-old to be put in a dormitory full of blind people. I got bullied for having quite good sight.

“I had a talent and ability to do things and I was more promoted on the sporty side rather than the academic.”

At 16, he left to go to a specialist blind college in Birmingham where he studied engineering, but the course did not go to plan.

“I could do things perfectly but not explain on paper how I had done them. I left college with nothing and in a pretty bad state mentally at the time. I knew I couldn’t read and write very well.”

Wilson still loved cricket but after becoming a single parent following the end of his first marriage, he gave up playing regularly. But after becoming friends with a fellow visually-impaired Barnsley fan and fellow cricket lover called John Garbett, he was eventually persuaded to give the game a go again.

“I thought, by heck it hasn’t half changed. They had proper kits, proper wickets, proper clubhouses and proper teas,” he says. “I played in a game and the Yorkshire captain had come to watch. He said, ‘What are you doing on July 7 because we would like you to play in the first team?’ I thought, ‘Playing for Yorkshire - that is massive’.

“Even though it is visually-impaired cricket, it is still representing Yorkshire at cricket. We go down to places like Sussex and Somerset and you are playing in a uniform and representing Yorkshire.”

In 2016, he was sponsored by the Vision Foundation charity to get his cricket coaching badges and he sat a course with 23 other people, all of whom were fully sighted.

The visually-impaired game follows the same principles of the ordinary laws of cricket but with some specialist equipment and a few different rules to make it fair.

“When you are bowling, you say ‘are you ready, batsman?’ On release of the ball you have to say ‘play’. If the player asks where the fielders are they have to clap,” explains Wilson. “If you are watching from the sidelines, you would think it is quite funny.

“I’m not in it to win anything, I’m in for my own self-esteem and my own wellbeing.

“I also hope I’m improving people’s lives. The ECB award was fantastic, I couldn’t believe it. I was up against all these great people who had put many, many years into grassroots cricket. I felt a bit embarrassed and I never expected to win the overall award. When they called my name I couldn’t believe it.”

Wilson has helped hundreds of young players with the game but says he remembers particularly fondly a young boy called Jacob who had a number of other disabilities as well as his sight.

“We were trying to get him to run between the wickets and do a front-foot drive. Somebody rolled the ball and he stepped forward and hit the ball straight in one movement. It was a beautiful shot. That made it worth my four hours being out that day. I was so excited that he had that boost of confidence. He had come with his grandad and he was just over the moon.”

He says he tries to live as unrestricted a life as possible.

“I have always been a guy who looks on the positive side of things. If I do something wrong, nobody can kill me for it. If I catch the bus and get on the wrong one, I’ll just think, ‘what do I do now to get to the right place?’ Nobody stops me doing anything.

“Yes, you are restricted by your disability but you don’t have to be restricted from everything. I get told I’m an inspiration but I don’t think I am.

“I have said all my life they can never take sport away from me; they can take my eyesight away but they can’t take sport away – that is what it means to me.”

Passion for gardening

Martin Wilson qualified as a horticulturist in 1997 – “the year Barnsley got promoted” – after taking a course at a disabled college in Nottingham.

He says before the course he had thought he hated gardening but soon realised he had an aptitude for it and enjoyed the process of cultivating different things.

“I thought I couldn’t stand gardening. But everything I seemed to touch seemed to bloom and blossom and look nice,” he says.

“I have always been a very tactile person and really enjoyed it.”

Wilson is also involved with the Sheffield Royal Society for the Blind and takes an active role in the organisation’s gardening group.


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