A day at the cricket—7 July 2024

Brian Sanderson catches a Sunday cup match

I awoke on Sunday to the beginnings of another deluge, but although there was plenty of televised entertainment to choose from—I could have stopped in for Wimbledon or the Silverstone—I was to determined to get some cricket, so off I went to see the Green Lane Thirds take on the Kirkstall Education Thirds in the Airedale & Wharfedale Senior Cricket League’s Chappell Cup (named after the league’s long-standing secretary).

Green Lane is about five miles north of my home in Headingley, away towards Otley. Established in 1919 by the employees of the Naylor Green Lane Mill, it originally played on a ground called “Cricketer Green.” When this was swallowed up by housing, they moved to their present ground in Nunroyd Park, where they share the pavilion with a rugby-league outfit. Their third team is in Division Two.

Kirkstall Education Club is even more venerable. It was founded in 1853 by a group of young men from the Kirkstall Educational Society, a literary club attached to the school at St Stephen’s Church. The ground is on Queenswood Drive, about a mile from Headingley, and really is called the Field of Dreams. Their third team plays in the First Division.

We arrived just as play getting underway, but Green Lane lost their first wicket before we could set up our chairs. There was no crowd to speak of—literally one man and his dogs—but it was a fine day for it. The sun came out from time to time, and the wind was restrained, which partially accounts for the excellent catching of the Kirkstall fielders. Green Lane soon found themselves 37 for eight, but some commendable resistance from the tail took them to 71 all out after 31 overs. The star of the show was a young man named Jitesh Kirankumar, whose medium-pacers brought him four for eighteen.

During the interval we wandered over to the wicket to have peek at the strip. It was green, but despite the weather we’ve had, pretty dry and true. The groundsman is to be commended. The club does very well to keep going on a public park which is used for football in the winter. (Two years ago it was occupied by squatters; several matches had to be cancelled before they moved on.) There were also two independent umpires, which is unusual at a time when leagues are struggling to recruit them.

Kirkstall took their time about winning the match, getting home by seven wickets in the nineteenth over, even after a small rain break. Special mention must  go to Mustapha Hussain, one of openers, who hit an excellent 41 not out.

So Kirkstall move on to the Round 3 of the Chappell Cup.

Brian Sanderson is an ACS member. He serves on the Yorkshire Cricket Archives Committee. If you would like to contribute to this newsletter, please either respond to the email in which you received it, or leave a comment below.