INAUGURAL SOLSTICE CUP MATCH AT SEFTON PARK

Date: 21st June 2010

The history of cricket is littered with strange games but few have been quite so bizarre as the inaugural Solstice Cup match which began on Sefton Park CC's picturesque ground at precisely 4.43am yesterday morning.

The idea behind the contest was that two teams, swiftly christened the Early Risers and the Long Shadows, should play a 20-over game beginning at sunrise on the longest day of the year and ending in time for the players to go to work.

"Are those fellas playing cricket?" asked one astonished dog-walker, pausing in the middle of his early morning constitutional.

But it was not only non-cricketers who doubted the sanity of the scheme. "I thought that it was a really mad idea and that nobody would go for it," said Robin Surtees, Sefton Park's former fourth team captain, who first suggested that the sound of leather on willow should compete with the dawn chorus on June 21st.

"In fact, when I first put the idea forward, I didn't know exactly when sunrise was, but with it being the club's 150th anniversary, it just sounded like a golden opportunity to have some fun in the sun," added Surtees.

"As it turned out I didn't have any trouble at all getting 22 players. It's actually become a 12-a side game and it looks like it's going to become a regular event."

But not only did the Solstice Cup capture the interest of the club's cricketers, it also attracted about 15 diehard supporters, most of them equipped with rugs and flasks of tea as if this was just another afternoon game in the Liverpool Competition.

For the record, the Long Shadows beat the Early Risers by nine runs, although the fact that batsmen were regularly retired by their captains - on the grounds of either success or boredom - probably prevented sports journalist Chris Brereton, who made 31 not out, from becoming perhaps the first player in the history of cricket to score a fifty before breakfast.

This would have been a fine effort, not least because, as one of the younger players sagely pointed out: "It's difficult to bat when the sun's coming up."

Prepared exclusively for L&DCC by Paul Edwards.