TRINITY READY FOR A RETURN TO THE COMP

Date: 4th March 2016

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

Club and players raring to go - says skipper Phil Buck

When Southport Trinity took their leave of the Med Imaging Liverpool Competition in 2011, many observers of local sport reckoned the cricketers from the Rookery would be henceforth content to spend their days in the Southport and District League.

But those pundits were wrong. Following their third successive league title last September, Trinity eagerly accepted the invitation to rejoin the league and will play their first competitive fixture on April 16 when they travel to Sutton for a match in the Ray Digman Knockout Trophy. A week later they will visit Parkfield Liscard for their first league match of the new era and Skelmersdale will visit the Rookery on April 30. It is a remarkable renaissance and it has not happened by accident.

When they left the Competition five years ago, Trinity cited money and travelling as the major reasons behind their departure. Those issues have now been addressed. The club now has some money in the bank and and further fund-raising is planned. Its players are now more than relaxed about a fixture list in which the longest journey takes only 20 minutes more than the corresponding trip last year.

In more ways than one, Trinity are ready for the long haul and Phil Buck, their chairman and first team skipper, is quietly bullish about their prospects.

“A lot of the problems five years ago were down to money,” he said. “We didn’t have any. Now we are in a far healthier position and we also have a great sponsorship deal with Norman Wallis at Pleasureland.

“We’d also let our junior system go totally but now we have all our junior teams back and we have four or five Level II coaches.

“For us, the District League was getting a bit stale. We were having three or four decent games a season and w

e won the league three years on the trot.

A lot of games were finished at five o’clock.”

All of which is splendid news for Southport cricket fans, who now have four clubs among which they can distribute their custom and support. But diehard Trinity supporters will be keen to see their club prosper on the field even as the bar takings are increasing in the pavilion.

And here again, Buck is in optimistic mood.

“I think we’ll hold our own this year because we have former Competition players available like Colin Maxwell and Geoff Thornton and we’ve also engaged an Australian lad called Shaun O’Neill, who plays club cricket in Melbourne and played club cricket in Kent last year,” he said. “He’s a 25-year-old opening bowler and a middle-order batsman. We have two lads over there at the moment and they say he looks like a decent cricketer.

“We’ve also got a few other lads who’ve said they’ll be playing for us but they haven’t told their clubs yet. This year we’ll have a bigger first-team squad and that will make a huge difference to us.”

Buck is honest enough to accept that the demands of the Competition came as a surprise to Trinity last time out. One senses that in some ways those painful experiences have toughened the club’s players and officials. All in good time, they are looking more at progressing up the league than merely staying in it.

“We have a committee structure in place and a strong sponsorship effort led by a lad called Owen Lea-Porter,” said Buck. “The ground’s in great order and Colin Maxwell’s put in an awful lot of work in to make it so. The foundations have been laid for us to progress.”