Badgers Cricket Club – News Archive Page – Season 2007
This page provides a repository of all the archived news items for 2007, in reverse chronological order. If you really have a desire for the older or newer entries, then the links below will get you access to all those that I’ve saved over the twenty-four and a half years that the site has been in existence.
A new venue this year, Purley Sports Club, did us proud (even if there was much of it that yours truly was not allowed to eat) and a good time was had by one and all. Unfortunately I’m writing this months after the event so I don’t remember a great deal, but I can tell you (thanks to Mark jogging my memory) that the various bits of silverware found their way to:
| Batting | Pat Redding | 478 runs @ 59.8 |
| Bowling | Darrell Pitts | 15 wickets @ 15.5 |
| Fielding | Mark Gordon | 13 catches |
| Fantasy Points | Graham Ward | (finally managed to win it then, Graham) |
| Captains | Ray & Kay Ward | |
| Frank Butt | Graham Ward & Graham Davenport | |
| ‘Wang Fu’ | John Larkin | |
| ‘Dog Biscuit’ Award | Dave Tickner |
Not much in the way of record breaking this season – although Darrell took his first five wicket haul for the club and both Grahams, Davenport and Ward, made their first ever fifties (hence the joint award of the Frank Butt Cup) – but the team performances continue to vary wildly, with the now all too familiar big loss one week being followed by a big win the next.
| Back to index of season 2007 news items |
It is with great sadness that I must (rather belatedly) report the untimely
death, at just 55 years of age, of one-time Badgers’ stalwart Alan Wilkes. Alan
played fifteen seasons for the club, 159 games from 1989 to 2003, and was a
regular over those years barring two achilles tendon problems (the second being
sliced by a pane of falling glass, if memory serves) severely curtailing his
participation in a couple of seasons. For some reason I have a clear as a bell
mental picture of meeting Alan for the first time on the occasion of his first
game for the club, against Wallington Old Foresters at some school in Purley
whose name escapes me, and where we only played the once. I can picture a wooden
fence next to which Alan had parked, and remember being struck that I’d never
seen anyone turn up for a game of cricket on a motorbike before – an
Indian-made Triumph rip-off to boot.
I have no particular memories of the game from that first occasion, but I do remember the same fixture in the following season, played at the Fire Brigade ground in Ewell, where Alan made his best ever score for the Badgers – 80 out of 185 for 4 declared – in a muscular style. At the time we thought he looked quite useful and would probably make a few more innings of that nature, but he never really fulfilled his potential as a batsman for the club, and seemed to lose interest in batting as time went on. His best bowling figures for the club were 7 for 38 against Banstead in the first game of the 2000 season, and you can read a (rather brief) report of that performance, which was actually the first ever match report on this website.
Alan was a niggardly bowler who regularly supplied the sort of control on the opposition’s scoring that was most welcome to me as captain of the side throughout most of his years with the club. He had been a league cricketer in a former life, which showed in occasional attempts to wind the other side up a little, but he adapted himself to the Badgers’ ethos and took the gentle ribbing that he received about his fielding in good part. We didn’t always see eye to eye on strategy decisions on the field, nor on when conditions were playable and when they were not, but those disagreements were always conducted in an amiable fashion and he was a good team mate. He will be missed and our condolences go out to his widow Helen.
Footnote: whilst researching this item I found tributes to Alan on various football-related sites, including the Football Association’s own site (sadly no longer in the original location and nowhere to be found as far as my searching skills can determine – clean up Ed.) and a couple dedicated to Chester City FC, including this unofficial site (you’ll need to scroll down to find the item as there are no internal anchors for me to link to). However, I was amused to discover an item on the website of Eastwood Town FC (which no longer exists although, as of June 2012, you can find the same text on this Eastwood Advertiser page – clean up Ed.) whose nickname, in an almost unbelievable coincidence, happens to be ‘The Badgers’ (again, you will need to scroll down – only the last three paragraphs relate to Alan).
| Back to index of season 2007 news items | View archived news items for season 2006 |