Unusually, the Rake Lane team has a free day tomorrow but that is followed by Sunday’s home Cheshire Cup semi-final against Didsbury and Monday’s Premier League visit to Wallasey, a match that has been rearranged so the local rivals can meet for their traditional Bank Holiday encounter.
By the time Evans’s players take the field on Monday, they will, weather permitting, know whether they have a cup final to which they can look forward and they will also have a clearer idea of what they need to do to win their first Liverpool Competition title since 1978.
As it stands New Brighton lead Ormskirk, the current champions, by 36 points with four games left in the season and Evans knows that his players have their best chance of winning their first championship this millennium. But he is also aware that they have been in similar positions before and he is in cautious mood.
“We’ve been very close over the years,” he admitted. “But that’s why if we can bring it home this year, it will be so big for the club.
“There have been times when we could have won it and times when we should have won it and there have also been times when we haven’t been anywhere near winning it.
“This position is not new for us, the only thing that’s different is having things in our hands rather than being in the chasing pack.
“But we’ve got four tough games and every team we play will have something to fight for. There won’t be any freebies and we have a tough one on Monday against Wallasey, who are in a relegation fight. If we play our own game hopefully the wins will take care of themselves.
“If we can beat Wallasey and then Leigh a week on Saturday, it will eventually become mathematical. Over the next four games, we just have to reproduce the type of cricket we have played in the last 18.”
If Evans needs any encouragement as he prepares his players this weekend, it might come from glancing at the league table and seeing that New Brighton have lost just two league games compared to Ormskirk’s five.
Paradoxically, he might also take quiet satisfaction from studying the tables of leading run-scorers and wicket-takers and seeing that New Brighton’s players do not feature prominently.
True, slow left-armer Ashraf Nawab has taken 66 wickets, but if New Brighton do indeed win the title in September, they will do so after a summer in which all their players have made a contribution.
Evans, himself, scored 756 league runs last summer but, such is his team’s strength, he has frequently batted as low as eight or nine this campaign.
“Everybody’s performing and we’re working well together,” he said. “We don’t depend on one or two players to perform.”
But while New Brighton’s game against Didsbury will attract the Rake Lane regulars on Sunday, other supporters of Merseyside cricket might do well to make their way to Moor Park where Northern are taking on Chester-le-Street in a Royal London Club Championship semi-final starting at noon.
A team from the Med Imaging Liverpool Comrpetition has never reached the final of this prestigious national knockout competition and James Cole’s players will welcome all the support they can get, albeit that it might be only lent to them for one afternoon.
