Mottram on the move

Amid all the uncertainty surrounding the Coronavirus outbreak, Mottram Cricket Club are driving forward with a number of plans on and off the pitch.

As well as employing a full-time grounsdman for the first time in the club’s history, Mottram will also be launching its first ever junior girls’ team and also competing in the Greater Manchester Cricket League.

Although the ground is shut at the moment for obvious reasons, club official Ayrton Fielding says there’s a general feeling of positivity amongst members. Speaking to Reporter Sport, Ayrton said: “The cricket club is a hub for a lot of people in the community, and during these testing times when you turn around to people and say there’s the potential of no cricket for the full season, and certainly for the first half of the season, it was obviously a shock to everybody. 

“We got to the turn of the new year and started preparing as we always would do with winter nets. The ground was also starting to be prepared  for the summer and we have employed a full-time groundsman for the first time in the club’s history. Joh Marsden had prepared our ground so well for a long period of time, but last year he decided that he was going to retire, so you go from  somebody who’s a club member and has prepared the ground for so long for such little cost, to potentially employing a full-time groundsman  at a rate of pay which is significantly more than what we had paid before.”

The lockdown couldn’t have come at a worst time for the club, as a lack of revenue streams now means they are having to find ways to raise funds to keep the groundsman on the pay roll. Ayrton said the club will be doing all it can to ensure that happens. “We have to continue to prepare the ground because whilst it’s expected that this virus lockdown and the suspension of playing sport will go on for quite some time, what we have to do as a club is to continue to ensure that if it changes, you need to have a ground that’s ready. 

“At the moment we’re looking at fundraising ideas so we can continue to pay the groundsman. He has a young family himself, so we’re looking at ways to keep him on the payroll in these difficult times.

“We’ve had fundraising drives over the years to improve the standard of the ground and most of the things you see at the club have been grant funded. As far as the refurbishment of the nets go we were pointed in the direction of a grant that was available which we utilised to part fund the refurbishment.

“It’s something that has needed to be done for quite some time and the lack of cricket was potentially a reason to put that on hold again, but we decided that if it was something that we would get behind and fund in the event that we can resume.”

After 20 years in the Derbyshire and Cheshire Cricket League, there was a feeling amongst members of the club that change was needed to push them forward. The Greater Manchester Cricket League provided the perfect solution and now Mottram are ready for the challenge that awaits. “From our point of view we saw the Greater Manchester Cricket League as something that was progressive and growing” said Ayrton.

“It represented a new challenge for us. The Derbyshire and Cheshire League have been great to us, but the amount of teams in the GMCL was something that really appealed to our members, but above all it’s something that we thought would revatalise the lads who play, week in week out.”

Mottram’s first team secured a fifth place finish in the Derbyshire and Cheshire Division One last season, and having retained the nucleus of the squad they are now confident of holding their own in the GMCL Division One. Ayrton said: “We lost a couple of players over the winter - one of the lads has moved to Greenfield - but we had a couple of players towards the end of last season who hadn’t played as much as they had liked, so they are committed to us this season and we are hopeful of a good season. That being said we’re going into the unknown a little bit and we’ve been placed into a division where we’re not sure of the standard it represents. Is it something that will test us? I think it probably will do, but what we wanted to be able to do was give the lads who have played for us for many years the chance to see if the new level is appropriate to them.”