Don't Look Back in Anger!

It's taken me over a week to write this blog. It has been hard to decide how to approach it, what to write and in what tone. Allowing some time to reflect on the final weekend's games has reduced the disappointment and annoyance, and allowed more benign and measured thoughts to make themselves felt. Remember, we had a scorcher of a summer, England actually did pretty well in a football competition, and Brexit is all sorted - oh, scratch that last one.

As most of you already know, the final two games of our season were washed out by the weather. The first one fairly - every club was equally affected, the final game possibly not so fairly as almost all of the other fixtures were played. The no-go at Barrowford allowed Crossflatts to pip us to second place and promotion to division two by the very finest of margins - level on points but they had one win more than us so overtook us on that last day.

But putting all of that to one side, we can and should look back on this season as being a massively successful one. Twelve months ago we finished the 2017 season rock bottom with just three wins all year, were relegated, and let's not forget we had gone from two teams down to one. This year we finish third (level second I would call it), saw some magnificent individual and team performances, scored thousands of runs and generally enjoyed the games so much more than last year. Throw in our new tenants, Eldwick & Gilstead, bringing a whole new dimension to alternate Saturdays at the club and things have been pretty good all in all.

I don't want to pre-empt any of the awards (we have awards and we will be holding an event on October 6th at the club - Jamie was supposed to tell everyone on Tuesday...) but I'll still mention a few successes here. In the batting stakes Qaddy, Shanny, Akeel and Steve all had great seasons. We had 5 centuries (one a double!) and 16 fifties. Nine players scored more than a hundred runs for the team. Three of them scored over 500! Seven players averaged more than 20. In the bowling stakes, Qaddy, Shanny, Danny and Zain excelled. Three players took over 20 wickets. Shanny and Qaddy both bowled over 170 overs! Fielding we had 50 catches, 8 run outs, and 30 wicket keeping dismissals in total.

So there's plenty to celebrate when you look at the bigger picture. So let's not get too downhearted, and remember, last year we were relegated in September and promoted back in October. Meanwhile Eldwick finished third and were promoted, as were Bradford & Bingley who finished fourth. So nothing is for certain just yet - who knows what the coming months may bring?