Leigh - Getting It Right

Date: 5th August 2010

A Paul Edwards copyright exclusive for L&DCC Official Website.

Cricket clubs are like ducks. See one in the summer and it offers a picture of serene, if stately, progress; only when you look under the surface do you see the amount of hard work and paddling needed to keep the place moving forward. The difference is that if a duck stops paddling, it stays where it is; if the work stops at a cricket club, the place can sink

Now it would be going too far to say that people had stopped working at Leigh CC three years ago, but Beech Walk loyalist Derek Ainscough admits that the club had "got itself into a bit of a mess". Having missed out on sponsorship money on which they had been counting, the club had to cut back and rely almost exclusively on its own adult and junior members. There would be no Iqbal Sikander, no Jo Angel, no Graeme Rummans.

Leigh finished bottom of the ECB Premier League that summer and it hurt like hell. "We came in for a lot of flak," said Ainscough, who makes no secret of his passion for the club. "People said the examples of Huyton and Leigh showed what happened when you had 14 teams in the Premiership. But we'd been let down and we suffered the consequences of that. I don't think we deserved to be treated as we were." Instead of mewling about their fate, though, Leigh's members got down to work in sorting the club out. Thanks to a £500,000 from the lottery, they already had a new pavilion and three artificial wickets, although the rest of the money was earmarked for the tennis section. However, the square needed work, the scorebox was a bit dilapidated and what about the first team.. "We steadied for a year and we got our ex-skipper Dave Dove back," said Ainscough. "Then we put together a three-year programme with the aim of getting back in the Premier League and it looks like we're on course to achieve that objective."

Indeed it does. As I tap out these words on the eve of the Edgbaston Test, Leigh lead the First Division table by 27 points ahead of their visit to Liverpool. This has been achieved not by lashing out on overseas pros but by developing their own talent and by persuading local players Karl Brown and Steven Mullaney to play for the club. After having spells at Northern and Milnrow, Brown was keen to play for the side which is only a few miles from his Atherton home. Mullaney's contract with Nottinghamshire was hardly consonant with his staying at Firwood Bootle, but Leigh were happy for the all-rounder to turn out for them as and when he could.

"Both Karl and Steven are local lads," said Ainscough, "and while Steven can't play for us as often as we would like, Karl turns out regularly and is doing a great job. He's always in the club and he comes down for any functions we have. It wasn't hard to convince people that we shouldn't employ a foreign professional. Players coaches and junior cricketers and would prefer to see money reinvested in the club's development programmes."

The result of those development programmmes can currently be seen in the form of players like Matty McKiernan, Joe Davies and Richard Dempster, all of whom have played useful roles in Leigh's promotion bid. As for the ground, Beech Walk looks a picture. The outfield is smooth, the square is benefiting from being koroed three years ago and a grant from Virador Waste Management has funded the building of a very smart new scorebox. Three years after one of the worst seasons in its history, Leigh are now wondering whether they should make ever so cautious preparations for Premier League cricket. What is the moral of this brief investigation into the recent history of one Liverpool Competition club ? Well, it isn't that every club should follow Leigh's example. Clubs will sort out their own solutions to any problems that they face.

However, it does seem important to point out that a bad season need not prompt doom-laden predictions about the future. In a month or so, two clubs will be relegated from the ECB Premier League and another two from the First Division of the Bridging Finance Solutions Liverpool Competition. Leigh's example shows that there is a road back to prosperity, both on and off the field.