IT'S ONWARDS AND UPWARDS FOR HIGHTOWN ST MARY'S

Date: 15th July 2015

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

Club moving forward after a difficult few years.

Hightown St Mary’s first team have won four and lost six of their 12 games in Division Two of the Med Imaging Liverpool Competition. They lie ninth in the table.

But the curious thing is that on cricket’s largest canvas, it hardly matters. What is important is that cricket is being played on the ground which is bordered by Sandy Lane. And there have been many days in the past few years when it seemed that the great old ground had seen its last ball bowled.

If the fire which gutted the old pavilion was not enough, an exodus of players which gutted the first team after a new pavilion was built seemed to some members to be the death knell for Hightown CC. The only possibility of salvation seemed to lie in negotiating a merger with Crosby St Mary’s CC

“Around eighteen months we sat down and had to decide whether the club had a future,” said Nick Gordon, who led the merger talks and also discussed the club’s plight with officials from the Liverpool Competition.

“At that point we had been talking to Crosby St Mary’s and had been for some time but nothing was confirmed. We began last season not knowing whether we’d be playing at the end of it. That was the bottom of the curve.”

Thankfully the merger talks went smoothly and it was agreed that instead of playing in Division One, the old Hightown club would move down to Division Two at the beginning of the 2015 season.

“The league management committee were very good and understanding in that they understood that with the players that had left we couldn’t compete in Division One and that even Division Two was going to be a challenge,” said Gordon.

“We confirmed the merger part way through the season and some of the St Mary’s lads came over and started playing for us before the end of the season. Everyone else came over at the start of this season. And with the certainty that we were going to field three teams, we could look to strengthen the first team for this year. So we feel as though we’ve come through the worst of it.”

Indeed, what else could fate throw at the club? When your pavilion has gone in a couple of hours and your very existence has been threatened, losing a few cricket matches is hardly a disaster.

“The integration is going smoothly and we feel more unity as a club than we have for some years,” said Gordon. ‘We socialise together and when the merger was going through we made a point of forming a committee that had equal representation from both clubs and that has worked really well. The phrase we’ve adopted is: “Onwards and upwards” ‘.

“The exodus we suffered would have had the same effect at other clubs. There was no ill feeling and no mass walkout, it just happened. Now we’ve begun to attract players again because people can see that Hightown St Mary’s is a nice place and one where they would like to play their cricket.

“This year we’ve strung some wins together and we’ll try to build on that. At the moment we feel very positive about the future.”