Nick Ahad: Sad demise of Little Marsden proves salutary lesson to us all

Infotainment (informative-entertainment) I think is the word, invented by someone who belongs in the seventh circle of hell.

For the serious, proper stuff, you need our cricket correspondent, the ridiculously talented scribe Chris Waters.

I’ve been around these parts a little while now, mind, so I hope you’ll permit me to be just a tad serious(ish) for a moment.

Let me take you back a bit, to early December and the North Yorkshire town of Skipton.

Apologies to anyone who was disturbed in that town on the evening of December 5 by the sight of some mad-eyed bloke in a Renault, smoking heavily and stopping at seemingly random points to head-butt the steering wheel and shout obscenities at his windscreen.

It was me. And I was lost. And I was late.

I was trying to find a sports club in which the annual general meeting of the Craven Cricket League was being held.

I had a minute to get there and did not have a clue how I would achieve this, by that point, seemingly impossible, feat.

Why was I running late and lost?

Well, even though I work in Leeds and live in Bradford, my first cricket club was Airedale in Keighley and, 20 years on, it would feel wrong, almost indecent, to don my whites for any other team.

I’m sure a lot of you can relate.

Most of the lads playing for the club are a little more sensible (and maybe less sentimental?) and play for Airedale because it is their local club. That is to say, most of the lads live in and around Keighley.

Which means all their starting points are a damn site closer to Skipton than any of mine.

So when our newly-elected chairman (lovely chap, hands out brownie points where they’re deserved) Tim, announced he wouldn’t be able to represent Airedale at the Craven League AGM I thought ‘well, with all the members – bar me – living over Skipton/Keighley way, there’ll be a volunteer soon’.

Tim sent out an email on Thursday asking for someone to represent the club – failure to send someone ends with us being fined. Nothing.

By Friday, the email silence was worrying. By Saturday, it was concerning and by Sunday it was deafening.

I couldn’t quite believe the apathy, so, as a club captain, I felt duty bound and stuck my metaphorical hand up, volunteering to go.

That Monday night I set off for Skipton, cursing my team-mates and fellow club members all the way, mile by miserable, cold, rainy, mile

Fortunately, once I eventually found the venue (I did, eventually, find the venue) I thought ‘ey up, this is perfect material for a column’.

Which is fortunate because meetings like that go on. And on. And on. Thinking up this column was about the only thing that stopped the will to live slipping away for good.

I’ve checked with the people who run the league and therefore who hold only marginally more power than a Roman Emperor with his thumb stuck out in a coliseum and I’ve been told I can share certain details with you.

The first is that the league made a tidy profit of £1,422 in 2011. Not bad, right? Wrong.

That money comes entirely from – and you will think I’m exaggerating but I have fact-checked this – fines.

I do have a responsibility to my league, so I should very quickly point out that these aren’t fines for bad behaviour – it’s not like the Craven League is choc-full every Saturday with blokes battering seven bells out of each other, even though it does cross the Yorkshire-Lancashire border.

No, the fines come from infringements of rules like not putting your scoresheets in on time and not phoning in results by the deadline (they aren’t half sticklers in our league).

The other, sadder, news from the evening is that one of the clubs in the league has folded.

Little Marsden’s cricket club is no more.

The chaps that run the club sent a letter apologising to and thanking the league for everything.

They also made it clear that with effectively two people running the whole club, they had no option but to fold.

So, we had a club that has disbanded due to lack of help from members – and a lot of clubs handing over money to the league for what amounts essentially to disorganisation, brought on by essentially the same malaise.

Which brings me to the point of all this.

I (sort of) jest when I say I was angry that I had to travel to the league AGM.

Truth is, I could do a heck of a lot more to help out the club – and so could most.

With our increasingly busy lives, Saturday, for the village cricketer, is an oasis of calm in an otherwise busy world.

The only relevance the numbers Twenty/20 have in (my standard) of village cricket are in relation to runs scored to overs.

In fact, the height of 20 runs in 20 overs would give some (most) of our batsmen a nosebleed.

But these little patches of paradise need people to go to (interminable) committee meetings, where we discuss if we should pay Old Jack £20 to mow the ground once a week or Fred £50 to mow it three times a month (that discussion lasted an hour).

At the club’s last committee meeting, we discussed balls for 50 minutes.

It’s the sort of thing that sees you through the dark winter months when the club needs to keep moving forward when there’s no actual cricket being played.

They are also absolutely vital if the, let’s face it, anachronistic tradition of English village cricket is going to continue to survive.

Without those meetings and without people to attend them, we might keep turning up on a Saturday, but there wouldn’t be much point because there would be no club at which to play and we’d all go the sad way of Little Marsden.

and another thing...

Money.

Money, money, money.

Makes the world go round, the love of it is the root of all evil – and cricket clubs need it to survive.

I’m not going to do anything as gauche as put out an appeal for sponsorship for my club here in the YP. Instead, I’m going to do it on behalf of all clubs.

As the nights get ever so slightly lighter, there are a lot of weekend cricketers around the country whose tummies are getting a little fluttery knowing that the next season is closer than the last. And we’re all starting to think about the financial running of the club for another season.

I’ve been trying to think of a reason why, if you’re a business or a moneyed individual, you might want to lend your local club a hand.

The best reason I can think of is to get you to imagine not being able to drive, walk, ride past a field in summer and spot a cricket game. Not being able to stop to idly watch for a moment – or many – the sight of a cricket field in the English countryside in a glowing summer and all the wonderful things that evokes.

Imagine not spotting those shimmering white figures as the sun drops low across this green and pleasant land on a summer afternoon. Seems as good a reason as any.