Last night I was invited to the end-of-season awards night for the Cavendish Cavaliers, a very fine local cricket club that I ran and skippered for many happy years. To my surprise, the committee had an award for me and I was very proud to be offered the Presidency of the club. An absolute honour and one I was delighted to accept.
The club has moved on in many positive ways since I retired and Andy, Chip and Chris Ward in particular have done a sterling job in getting people involved in cricket, particularly the young people who have found the Cavaliers to be an easy and natural home. Looking around the room, I only recognised about half the attendees and I only ever took the field with a handful of those present. That really is testament to the positive atmosphere, solid leadership and good recruitment that has taken place over the last couple of years. I was pleased that Chris took the time to mention the heritage of the Cavaliers and the ethos that we started with and I am confident that the Cavaliers have a team at the top who will keep the old spirit alive.
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The story of the Cavaliers goes back to the early 2000s when a bunch of us used to go to a place we called the Secret Green in Wellswood for barbecues, beer and ball games. This was very much Kev’s home turf and some Sundays a whole gang of us would be there enjoying the summer sun. There was also an artificial cricket wicket there and we used to go and knock a ball around between burgers; gradually the cricket started to dominate over the barbecue. These were the days just after Flintoff’s Ashes, and it seemed everyone wanted to play cricket.
The name of the club, by the way, comes from a video that we made at the Secret Green. I was doing some writing and making video clips for a Douglas Adams-inspired (and founded) website called h2g2, and some of the regulars helped me to make a low-quality video for the site. I wanted to give them credit, so came up with the name ‘Cavendish Cavaliers’ more as a video credit than anything – most of us were involved in some way at the Cavendish Hotel in Torquay at the time. That first video includes future regulars Chip, Si and Kev as well as me playing some spanking shots that I have barely played since:
By the summer of 2008 I had realised that we had enough players to actually form a team and I approached a couple of local sides to see if anyone would be willing to play us. To my excitement and amazement, Sheldon Optimists said yes and on 10th July 2008 we played our first game. I still remember the frantic last few days organising our kit – complete with logo, still used today, designed by my brother Ed, and our cod-Latin motto Inefficax fidens (nobly incompetent) – and hoping it would arrive in time. Shaldon not only put their field back for the first ball so Grandad could score the Cavaliers first run, but they also blocked the final over so that we could claim an honourable draw. It was a fantastic evening and, not for the last time, we were able to say that cricket was the winner.
And once we’d played that first game, we were off. It was all uncharted territory. From the start, the ethos was that everyone who wants to play can play, regardless of ability, and everyone is involved. Nobody turned up to bat 11 and not bowl, and everyone leaves wanting to come back next week. As a social skipper, this is the most important aspect because for the most part you’re captaining non-cricketers, many of whom can’t bat or bowl terribly well. For some of them, it even came as a shock to find the ball was hard. Although it was all a bit silly at times we had a laugh, never took things too seriously, and tried to do everything like we imagined a proper cricket club would.
Thats’s not to say we didn’t have some players. Ian Chalk passed into Cavalier legend by hitting the first ball he faced up the hill for six at Cockington. Aaron Bowden played so well against Babbacombe that they asked him to play league cricket for them. Andy Ryder took a five-fer against a touring side in a T20 at Barton and against another touring side at the same ground I hit a 50 against a ‘four-pronged West Indian fast bowling attack’. Soon, we were touring ourselves and had some memorable weekends all over the Westcountry and south Wales. On one of those tours, Jake became the first Cavalier to score a century, a feat I followed at Thorverton a couple of weeks later. I wrote match reports for every game and learned how to code so that I could write my own SQL code to manage the stats on the website, years before Play Cricket did the same. We played fancy dress cricket in our own version of the Ashes, played beach cricket for Sport Relief, and organised the Stumped Up A Rockface Challenge with a local climbing club. We even played an international match against The Gambia on the first day of my honeymoon. There are more memories to sift through than I can fit into one blog post: perhaps I’ll share more in the future. I always considered skippering the team to be an enormous pleasure and a privilege and they were great times.
By the time Covid-19 hit, I was starting to run out of steam. Many of the friends and relatives who we had started with had moved on and our numbers were declining. Although we kept the club active and played every year, it was a struggle. Like many, my mental health suffered badly through the covid years and I was going through a tough patch at work. I was lucky and came out of it with a new enthusiasm for life, a new business that Kev and I had set up during lockdown and big plans for cycle touring. With hindsight, cricket was one of the things that I had subconsciously decided to leave behind.
The Cavaliers had been a defining part of my life for 15 years and I didn’t want to let go. I started the 2023 season more enthusiastic than I had for a while, but I broke my finger during pre-match catching practice and had to sit a few games out. In July I rode the Dartmoor Classic and I was so unfit that I realised that I had to choose between cricket and cycling. And I had the nagging doubt that perhaps now others could do the job better than I could.
My final match was on 27th July 2023 and, with perfect symmetry, the match was against (now Teignmouth and) Shaldon with my old friend Glynn Ballman still skippering, 15 years almost to the day after we had first met on the pitch. This time the field wasn’t set back for the first ball, and I was bowled by a yorker for a third-ball duck.
The Cavaliers have moved on, and I’m glad about that. We needed fresh impetus, a focus on youth, someone in charge that hadn’t got all the struggles of a brand-new business taking priority. It was difficult to say goodbye but it was the right moment both for me and for the Cavaliers and being at awards night with so many new faces was amazing. I always said that the Cavaliers was too good an idea to let go and its great to see that so many people agree.
I’m very proud and honoured to have been offered the club presidency and I will continue to offer the club and committee all the support I can in the years to come.
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